The Truthful Art (Profile 1: John Grimwade) - MariaAguilarV/JMM-622-Infographics-and-Data-Visualization GitHub Wiki

Another interview shared by Cairo in the Functional Art is with John Grimwade, the Graphics Director of Condé Nast Traveler magazine and owner of an information graphics business. Grimwade talks about the importance of the storytelling behind a graph, he emphasizes that technology can change, but the principles for making graphs remain the same. When designing a graph, Grimwade starts by making sketches, establishing hierarchies, identifying the main components of the story and how they will be sequenced on the page or on screen. In this way, he ensures that the obtained product will tell a story to the reader, that the final graph will give the reader some new and interesting information.

Cairo and Grimwade also talk about data visualization as an emerging field, and the interviewee states that, although this field has a lot of potentials, some visualization designers just focuses on making beautiful and intricated graphs which don’t really tell a story or leave the readers to make their own conclusions. In fact, Grimwade mentions that The New York Times has been adopting and trying this new approach of making some more creative graphs that seem understandable at first sight. However, there is something important to consider on them, they have an “annotation layer” which is another layer of information included in the graph that gives some context and pointers to the readers in a way that makes the connection of data understandable and make readers want to go deep into the figures.

Another important insight from this interview is that the planning phase is very important when designing a graph, Grimwade makes very detailed sketches by hand. He says that this technique is useful because sometimes using the technology to illustrate this level of detail might take a long time, and it could make the designer feel attached to his graph and become resistant to changes. Making good designs is all about trial and error, and years of experience.

This reading was helpful for me because this is one concern that I was having when looking at some illustrations, I realized that some graphs look complicated but they are complemented by some authors emphasizing their creativity and beauty. Other times I see complicated graphs and they are criticized by their complexity. So, how could I differentiate between good and bad designs? Is creativity a good practice? With this interview, I understood that all graphs deserve to spend some time looking at them, and if it has a story and if they help to understand important matters then it is a good design; if it is not, then it is a good practice to think what changes can be made to enhance it and, even more, as Grimwade suggests, making the changes by ourselves. This is a graph that I found in The New York Times and, in my opinion, it is a great representation of being simple, beautiful and creative. Although the interactive version is amazing, I think that a static graph can also work. It represents how white boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys, on the other hand, are more likely to become poor even if they had grown up in rich families. It provides a good context and it delivers an accurate message. The whole article can be found [here].(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html)