JKR

It was always going to be a good year for information graphics, as designers attempted to show the economic meltdown without resorting to another downwards red arrow. The Guardian’s solutions have been exemplary, and diagrams such as “what does a trillion dollars actually look like?” began life on the Internet and started popping up everywhere in the mainstream press – mind bogglingly big numbers required big ideas to explain them. But there has been much more than this:

2009 has seen a popular renaissance in the use of diagrams (like the one above designed by Danny Garcia) which subvert the dry nature of information graphics and make playful, engaging points. The example below comes from a fantastic book by a German scientist, gynaecologist and author named Fritz Kahn (1888-1968). These imaginative and fantastical diagrams of the human body from the ‘20’s were to have far reaching influence on all those “here’s the science bit” elements of advertising for sciency products. And he’s cool enough to get his book written up in the New York Times style section.

It seems like charts are suddenly big again, and in a world of over-information, from insurance to nutrition, it’s fair to say this is an often overlooked branding tool that can be more proactively used to breathe life into dreary back of pack claims ladders. So that’s my early trend prediction for 2010. As someone whose degree was in information graphics (a backwater of design education not noted for its glamour), all I can say is “every dog has its day”!