Information Design Journal - Volume 7, Issue 3, 1993

When there are conflicting views within a client body on the merits of an information-design product, judicious testing may provide a way out of a difficult situation. The process of discussing and agreeing upon that testing may itself provide useful clarification of the brief. This article discusses the testing of how well some warning signs stand out and how well they can be discriminated from each other. A railway authority wanted to replace remote area signalmen with stationary warning boards, but the union objected to the original design.Laboratory-based testing was used to answer questions about conspicuity and discriminability and to evaluate a proposed solution.

We discuss the results of an investigation into the graphic reporting practices used by 240 leading UK companies in their 1989 corporate annual reports. Our main findings are that 79 per cent of companies used graphs and that 64 per cent of all graphs were bar/ column graphs. Many of these were poorly designed and constructed. There was evidence of biasing in graphic choices, with the use of graphic presentation being contingent upon 'good' rather than 'bad' financial performance. Companies were three times more likely to include graphs in their annual report which exaggerated, rather than understated, favourable time series trends in key performance variables. There was also evidence of the use of certain design and construction techniques intended to create a favourable visual impression. There is a need for more studies of graphic practices in other domains, and for guidelines to raise the standards and fidelity of financial graphs.

This is the text of a lecture given at the conference on 'Design & reconstruction in postwar Europe', held at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, in January 1994. It is an attempt to locate a general principle of design - unjustified setting of text - in a precise historical context. The discussion focusses on experiments and debates over unjustified text in the years around 1945, by designers in Switzerland, Britain, and the Netherlands.