Burson-Marsteller Crossmedia

Good Transparency

von Mark Howells-Mead

If you set up a business and magazine called “Good” then you’d better try very hard to ensure that what you produce comes up to scratch. In the instance of Good Magazine, the editorial staff, designers and community do more than that; they create a publication and maintain a website which should be high on the inspiration and reference lists of media producers and designers the world over. Although the content of some sections of their website is a little thin, the overall presentation and feeling of the website is superb and the blogs are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

The style of one particular aspect of Good Magazine is why I’m writing this blog post at all. Our friends at Information Architects – the brains behind the Web Trend Maps which hang in our office in Bern and part of the team which recently worked with Burson-Marsteller to create the new interactive website for the Rütli meadow in Switzerland – sent us a link to an article which made my creative ears prick up (as it were). When you receive a tip of a cool piece of design from a company like Information Architects, whose Web Trend Maps are exquisite in their detail, you know it’s going to be something good.

We in the Burson-Marsteller Crossmedia team all provide creative support to clients and colleagues where we can, as they create presentations to get their messages across. One of the banes of the corporate or business presentation is the chart. The need for a mass of data to be communicated concisely and instantly, so that people who have to ingest a huge amount of information every day can quickly get the gist of what the data actually means. Presenting data in a graphical format which sticks in the mind and doesn’t get forgotten amongst the endless lines of Excel data. Pretty much anyone who has worked in a corporate environment will be familiar with the automated charts which office software packages create. Their ease of use for the “everyman” is the main reason why they are so ubiquitous. However, their ubiquity is part of the reason that it’s so hard to get your chart to stand out from the crowd.

Good Magazine regularly commissions experts from all over the U.S. to create informational graphic designs – “infographics” – to communicate data within the limited space afforded by a typical magazine or web page format. According to Clendaniel in the aforementioned article, the company calls in the designer, discusses the goals and data, then tells them to “go wild“: something which designers love to hear and rarely experience. The resulting Transparencies – cleverly named both for their reference to traditional projections and for the way they make the data transparent – are works of art in their individual rights. Whether illustrating the largest bankruptcies in history by using images of sinking ships, or demonstrating the sinking levels of fish in the world’s oceans by turning a chart into a colourful underwater world, there’s little chance that the data or its theme will be forgotten.

Graphic by and © GOOD and Fogelson-Lubliner

My personal favourite is this photographic depiction of where America’s largest cities source their water, which harks back to school day physics lessons and showing the proportional distance between points in an easily understandable way. (Click on the image above to see it at full size on the website of Good Magazine.)

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If you’re interested in Burson-Marsteller Switzerland’s corporate and publishing work, then you can see a few of our working examples here (in German).

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