Karl Gude

Arrrgh. I put my foot in my mouth yesterday…and it was bad. For the past two days, while judging information graphics here in Syracuse, I’ve hardly ever said what I was thinking about a graphic out loud. As a matter of fact, it’s illegal to say anything, because if another judge hears you, they may go all wishy-washy with their own opinion and decide that yours is better and not vote their conscience. Happens to me all the time …

Well, another judge heard my musings. What I said wasn’t so bad, but it was enough to make me want to ask the great supernatural being that rules these sorts of things for a do-over. As I stood across the table from another judge while looking at a graphic I shook my head and said, “I’m so tired of graphics using this schtick to convey this kind of information. It’s so overused.”

Guess who made the graphic.

Their response was, “Heh, why don’t you say that to my face?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Look at the byline,” this person said.
“Oh crap.” I thought to myself. “Sorry, I had no idea,” I responded.

The thing was, they had actually done a pretty good job with it.

The person went on to explain their reasoning behind the graphic, but it was awkward. Luckily, I had loved another graphic they had done!

Still…

Speaking of not talking to judges, it’s a bit frustrating because I can’t point out anything to the others, like a really cool treatment of data, or a clever solution to a problem or perhaps bad reasoning behind a nice looking graphic that destroys it. I’m sure they’d all like to voice these things, too.

You try to read as much as you can of a graphic to be fair. We have translators, too, for nearly every language. But the devil’s in the details. You can only HOPE that the other judges recognize these things when they vote.

But sometimes they wouldn’t and something would get eliminated that made me think, “Nooooo!” Other times things would get through and I’d think “Ouch! Take my name out of the SND book.” It was great when something I liked got through, though, to the medal round. I literally did the fist-pump and the knee-lift thingy once.

I’m seeing a lot of good drawing. Amazing stuff. Some of us were marveling at the sophistication of the software out there and the skills people have using it, and also thinking about how far drawing technology has come in such a short time. Many of the images, normal stuff by today’s standards, might have been gold medal winners just ten years ago simply because of the “wow” factor.

A lot of it is the same stuff, though. I’m guessing here, but I think I’ve seen about 10 stadium cutaways, 8 bank robberies, 20 bus and car crashes, 50 soccer diagram, 4 opera houses, 5 Superman posters, and the list goes on.

So, as a judge you start looking for what separates them, and that comes down to the basics: Innovation; interesting, applicable, and edited content presented in brilliant ways; dead-on design and typography; no clutter; judicious color use; a solid heirarchy and balance of visuals and information.

Not much of that stuff. Many brilliant artists might do well to take design and editing courses. I certainly was a terrible designer, and it still doesn’t come easily to me. My first three years at Newsweek were so humiliating that I hated the place. But I was lucky to work with very good people who taught me pretty well, and I now feel whole as a visual communicator. Not really “getting” design was my dirty little secret for most of my career.

But, luckily, there’s some really stand-out work here.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 7:46 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.