Information Design Journal - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2000

In this paper we are proposing an abstract rhetoric of relations for graphic forms. This rhetoric provides the primary groundwork for conceptualizing information design in visual and textual environments, not on the basis of their specific content or form, but at a level of organizational structure usually left inexplicit. Our premise is that the concept of a pictographic rhetoric, or metagraphic rhetoric, is a useful way of making explicit the abstract ordering of elements in texts, images, and graphic forms. These principles, critical to writing systems, pictographic and otherwise, also underlie the structure of graphs and diagrams of various kinds. Furthermore, they can be used to make explicit the rhetorical effects of the structure of inscribed or printed texts in their embodied, visual terms.

Nora Olgyay’s 1995 book, Safety symbols art: Camera-ready and disk art for designers provides the only commercially available, copyright-free art for a system of safety symbols that fufills the American National Standards Institute’s comprehension testing and design criteria for safety symbols. This article reproduces selected sections of its hereto unpublished companion publication, Safety symbols art: The testing protocol, materials & results which documents the research, testing protocol, materials and results for the IIID safety symbol system.

Graphical symbols are widely used on consumer and professional products. This paper discusses some of the practical issues involved in the design and application of graphical symbols, taking into account activities in the field of international standardisation and industrial practice. Special emphasis is given to the importance of understanding the role of graphical symbols in the communication process. The need to view the comprehension of graphical symbols as a usability issue is also stressed. Any meaningful statement about the comprehensibility of a graphical symbol must take users, tasks and context of use into account. The paper concludes with summary of guiding principles for designers based on the issues discussed.

Open-ended comprehension testing is a commonly-recommended form of evaluation for safety symbols, but such testing can be costly in terms of time, effort and expense. The present study examines several issues related to symbol testing. First, two alternative rating methods intended to approximate open-ended comprehension results were evaluated in both Study 1 and 2. The first method, used previously in the literature, had participants estimate the percentage of the population that would correctly interpret the symbol’s meaning. The second method involved providing participants with the symbol and its meaning and having them provide a rating of the correspondence between the two. Results demonstrated that both ratings correlated highly with participants’ open-ended comprehension results. A second issue relates to the way in which people perceive various qualitative aspects of the symbols (e.g., quality of the drawing, clutter, legibility and the extent to which the symbol conveyed a sense of hazard or danger) and how these variables relate to one another. Implications for symbol evaluation are discussed.

This article sets out to discuss the practical development of pictograms and the thoughts that lead to their final visual shape. It explains the personal considerations that combine all issues that are related to making graphics, such as drawing, technique, conventions, and commercial aspects. The article explains how ISOTYPE and its designer Gerd Arntz influences current day-to-day work. By drawing parallels with jazz, different approaches to drawing graphics are shown and explained.

Background. Following procedural instructions normally requires the learner to interpret written information before carrying out any action.This interpretation entails transforming pictorial and/or linguistic information into a series of actions. Current psychological models propose that these two kinds of information are not processed in the same way,and that pictures lead more directly to the construction of a mental representation than does text. If this is so, then giving pictorial instructions to carry out an action seems more appropriate than giving text.However, processing instructions sometimes fails, even with picture formats. One approach to studying why this kind of communication fails is to investigate how textual and pictorial information is processed.

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study into the influence of picture content and verbal language reading directions on reading procedural pictorial sequences. A sequence of four pictures representing the procedure hrow away after use as tested in four graphic configurations (one-line horizontal, one-line vertical, two-line horizontal and rhomboid), which were designed to be read in specific directions. The same configurations were also presented with the pictures removed to explore the effect of content on reading sequences. The results confirmed that verbal language reading directions are generally used to follow pictorial sequences. However, when the graphic configurations used to represent sequences are unfamiliar and the starting point of the sequence is not clear in the configuration, pictorial content influences the reading direction.

To indicate that the world ‘out’ there’ is what we, as humans, conceive it to be, and not as it is in and for itself, I will consider the image-making process as a process of visual modeling of concepts. As such, visual modeling is equivalent to the meaning-making process, since a graphic model is the conceptual model of structural and conceptual relations. I will discuss functional differences between images and diagrams, as categories fulfilling different expectations, the former being tools of art-making, and the latter being tools of information design. In order to facilitate the goal of advancing the level of visual literacy, I will examine the factors contributing to the shaping of the boundaries of visual literacy and aesthetic preferences. In doing so, I will relate the evolutionary process of form development to the development of its semantic dimension, using examples from the art of children. I argue that the rules of constructing images at the early stages of form development are identical with the rules of designing diagrams.

The paper explains the development of the Sabre air travel booking user-interface design during 1994–2000, which transformed a text-based, frame-oriented legacy system into a graphical version used by one-third of the worlds travel agents. The text comments on design explorations, issues, and resolutions.