My answer after reading Chapter 1 in Information Design, and the Information Design Workbook, and Chapters 1 & 2 in The Back of the Napkin: "There's a bit more to it than that. Boo-yah, gimmie an A+!" (The power of positive thinking people, keep saying it enough times and it'll happen.)
What I ultimately take away from those readings, and the content provided in our web module led me to create the following masterpiece to illustrate my own take on the subject:
Information Design = Information + Organization with the goal of Impact
Impact is the key in my eyes. And in the world today, impact almost always needs to be instantaneous in order to consider your design a success. What catches the eye, what's the most important thing, what message do we want to send and what design asethetics will help us achieve these goals?
Those are just some of the questions facing Information Designers. But in everything, you're competing for attention first, and then competing to keep that attention second.
"The purpose of Information Design is to Simplify, Integrate, Filter and Selectively Emphasize information." ~ Luigi Canali De Rossi
- Simplify: Make it as streamlined as possible to make it easy to understand
- Integrate: Make it fit the feeling, tone, and environment in which the information is being presented (ie: using that cool new graffiti style text is probably not a good idea for your company's next financial review presentation).
- Filter: Pick out the important bits and if you have a good number of less important bits, see if you can condense those down to a single important bit.
- Selectively Emphasize: Taking filtering to the next level by picking and choosing what information you want to portray (usually only the good parts). Like saying: "Hey mom, I just cleaned my room!" while neglecting to add "And destroyed the living room, your room, the neighbor's garage, and flushed my baby brother down the toilet."
Doing those things sounds rather simple, but the infinite possibilities in which you can go about achieving them can be so over-whelming that you get nothing more than a jumbled mess of data that has no order. You want your impact to capture your audience's attention, not bludgeon them to death with a metal pipe.
