The Universal Work Planner

Whether you're studying for exams, completing homework or polishing your shoes, this diagram is right for you. Too long has the world needed a Universal Work Planner that accurately describes the actions that must take place in any given work situation. So stop sitting on your bed deciding what to do about cleaning your cupboard, and use this perfectly crafted resource to give you a solution.

Note that this planner applies to all possible instances of work-related activity. No example of work can be found that breaks the functionality of this diagram. So don't try.

Type Triangle

I wanted to make a graphic about fonts. Then I realised that placing a few letters on a regular —and inevitably square— two dimensional plane would only give me two variables to play with. Boring. So this post has become more an experiment in graphing than a perfect commentary on typography.

Here, I've tried to represent a plane with three scales on it (formal–informal, masculine–feminine and classical–modern) that explains some fonts.  Each point represents the extreme of a different scale, the opposite extreme being approximately spread over the adjacent edge. I found that it does not work so well unless the three points are polar opposites, which does not work in itself if the three points represent ends of different spectrums. But the real trouble with the triangular plane is that not all combinations of the attributes are possible, for example you cannot place a font that is feminine but neither classical nor formal. (Such as Curlz MT?) Nevertheless I think it is an interesting thing to look at!

If you fancy yourself a type buff, see if you can name each font shown without looking them up. The ones I've included are: Century, Futura, Garamond, Gill, Helvetica, Minion, Modern, Optima and Times.

Guitar Sound Desk

I was trying to explain to a friend the other night about different electric guitar types, how they vary and what you'd use them for. It is things like this that really need to be explained with a diagram, and so what better way to set off on this blog adventure than by doing just that.

The information graphic above exhibits the five most common electric guitars that you can buy, and demonstrates how they sound in both tone and clarity. These include the the two most popular Fender and Gibson models respectively, followed by a generic hollow-body guitar (since the hollow-body guitar isn't a style of guitar particularly characterised by a specific brand).

In addition to the guitars shown, I've plotted some of the most common electric guitar genre zones within the diagram. These zones indicate where you would want to find a guitar if you were wanting to play that specific genre. As you can see, many genres overlap around where the Stratocaster is, which is probably why it is the most popular model of electric guitar around. However, it can also be noted how far away the Strat is from the metal zone. This means that as far as metal guitars go, the Strat sucks.

Please get angry if you disagree with my knowledgeable interpretation of guitar sounds. I would love to have an argument with you about it, and would be happy to adjust this diagram if you defeat me in said argument. This, however, would require commenting. So please comment. Don't bottle it up. That would be bad. Sad bad.

The Information Adventure Begins

We live in a world of information. The trouble is, it's encrypted.

In the western universe, we are exposed to over three thousand advertising messages a day, each encrypted with hundreds of subconscious pieces of information within them. Our brains can store approximately one thousand terabytes of information and can process over twelve hundred megapixels of visual information a second.

So we experience a lot of the world's information, but it is encrypted - coded - so that we have to translate it to our brain's individual language before understanding it. But we can't analyse it all. Most of the information we consume is stored as raw data. We simply can't keep up so long as all that information remains encrypted.

Enter StatBag.

Information design. That is what StatBag is about. Decoding some of the world's information and reconstructing it so that we can understand it better. And find some new meaning in it, too. It's not just a Bag of Statistics, but a Bag of Decoded Statistics. It should probably be called DecStatBag. But then again probably not.

So by reading this blog you're going on an adventure with information, statistics, design and statistical information design. And what better way to start an adventure than by drawing up a map of where we are going. Below is such a map. This is the compass for what will be contained within this blog, and will be referred back to at various intervals along the way. So if you're confused by the above, hopefully the following will shed some light on what this blog will contain.