Two brilliant pieces of graphic design

Two brilliant pieces of graphic design from the Khoi and the gang at the New York Times.

I've been meaning to link to the first one for a while. It's called Faces Of The Dead. Each member of the US Services who has died in Iraq is represented by a pixel sized square. When you click on a square, and therefore a name, the pixels form that person's face.

It's very well done, sensitive, interesting and a powerful way of representing some powerful statistics that we normally just see as lists or numbers. It's graphic design at it's best.

The second one from the same people is a pictorial representation of the key words used in all Bush's State Of The Union addresses. You can highlight keywords and see how often he mentioned that each year. You can pick obvious key words like Iraq or Terror or you can search for more obscure terms - like design, which he said 3 times in 2003. Again it's very well done. Sensitive, powerful and elegant.

What I like about both of these, but particularly the last one, is how they take important, dry information and make it accessible and interesting to a wide audience. The design helps the comprehension of the information rather than hindering it.

And it's exactly the sort of thing newspapers ought to be doing online.

Comments

[nick]

The latter of the two is along the same lines as this:

http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/

it'd be nice if they took that great design and expanded it outward to more historical speeches.

[Matt]

Thanks for posting this, fantastic. Reminds of the brilliant Edward Tufte books - particularly Envisioning Information. A must read for anyone interested in information and graphic design.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_ei

(Sorry, how do you add a link into a comment?)