Sunday, December 8, 2013

My bias against creativity in infographics and visualization

Slate has published a short essay about the bias against creativity, written by Jessica Olien, an illustrator based in Brooklyn. This weekend I'm grading my students' latest projects, so this grabbed my attention:
That paragraph rang a bell because I feel that some of my students —particularly those in the infographics and visualization classes— think that I curb their creativity by dismissing their attempts to use funky graphic forms, display headlines, and colorful ornaments, and by constantly recommending them to reduce clutter and consider classic ("boring") shapes, like bar charts, dot plots, scatter graphs, thematic maps, etc.

It's true: I do discourage unconstrained creativity when you are a beginner. Why? Because I'm convinced that if you want to bend or break the rules —and there are some rules in information design, and they are not the product of white old men's aesthetic choices, but of how the visual brain works— first of all you need to know them well: Study them, understand them, and apply them until they become second nature. You cannot think "out of the box" if you don't know what the box looks like, to begin with. Call me a traditionalist, if you wish.

I usually refer to Picasso to make my case. Before moving to abstraction and Cubism, he stuck to pure academic realism. Compare the two paintings below. I believe that the second one wouldn't have been possible without the first one: