These remind me of this brilliant poster for Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

Wordle is a popular visualization that creates "word clouds" from the frequency of words in a given text. Words which are used more frequently appear larger within the cloud. However, unlike a tag cloud, Wordle's organizational principles are more aesthetic than analytical. Instead of arranging words in linear blocks, the applet uses any available whitespace around and within words. The meaning of the results can be difficult to interpret, but the visuals are undeniably beautiful.

This raises a challenging question: "Is Wordle good?"

When I first started writing about Wordle, I was interested in using it on BlogLESS to learn something about our writing.

But the more I dug into the tool, the more I started to wonder what the word cloud actually represents. Jodi Dean examines this idea in her essay, Tag clouds and the decline of symbolic efficiency:

[H]ow can there be an ethics of the address if the words are not part of an address, if they are extracted from their position within speech acts to become artifacts and toys? (emphasis mine)

In other words (no pun intended), frequency doesn't necessarily have any meaning. Or perhaps, not the meaning we think it does. As a visualization, Wordle may not be telling the full story.

Wordle's creator Jonathan Feinberg understands this criticism, but considers the applet to be nothing more than a toy. According to the Many Eyes blog, it is "designed to give pleasure, not to provide reliable analytic insight". And yet, a magazine like Wired uses Wordle to examine political speeches. This is the conundrum.

It's not just a toy because the artist says it is-- not if the audience might think otherwise. Is a toy thermometer harmless when someone uses it to take a sick person's temperature? Can a toy masquerading as a tool really be so benign?

While I commend Feinberg for making visualizations easy to produce and good looking, I wonder if there isn't some ethical component missing? For a public that is generally uneducated about the meaning of data, can we truly say it up to them to interpret the pieces correctly-- that the designer or artist bears no responsibility?

I want to suggest (and don't I think this isn't the first time we've done so) that aesthetics and usability are not good enough. In addition, we ought to consider ethics in everything we make; morality as a component of quality. Good design must truly be good.

In a recent Boston Globe article, Matthew Battles invited several designers to compare the Bush-era whitehouse.gov with Obama's. They were asking: "Why does the site look better than Bush's?" and "What does the new page say about Obama's approach to governance?"

I'm not sure I completely buy their answers to either of those questions

The format of the article is to take some page element —the use of color on the page, for example— and compare the new with the old. But it feels like the comparisons aren't objective for the most part.

What are you supposed to be looking at here? The colors.

For example:

"The Obama site now has bold graduations [of color], texturing; Like Apple.com, it calls for reaction and collaboration" The Bush site, by contast, was muted and chaste, a pastel blue limited to the margins..."a set of dinner plates that only come out for visiting foreign dignitaries."

Really? Does that sound like an objective assessment or are we projecting with the metaphors here?

Instead of saying "the use of bold color focuses attention on headlines and interface elements" we get some partisan statement about how Obama is Steve Jobs and Bush is a stuffy old guy.

The article is seven paragraphs about form and one about function. If you compare the two sites, the content of the new page is not substantially different from the old one. In fact, it may be less genuine than Bush's. Obama's "blog" is a rebranded feed of press releases— there's no two-way communication. Besides a coat of paint and rearranged furniture, what's really that different about the new site?

The article is asking us to read too much into the new design. I like Obama and I like his websites, but I think there's some cognitive bias at work here.

Congratulations, its 2009 and you have a new website

Websites go in and out of fashion rapidly. With rare exception, there are few websites from even four or five years ago that would look or function as good as they did when they were first launched. To compare Bush's site with Obama's as though they were somehow contemporary is akin to comparing a Pinto to a Prius.

If the Bush whitehouse.gov launched today, I'd bet you it would look very similar to the current whitehouse.gov.

Obama's design looks better because it's up to date. Large slideshow images, subtle texture, bold use of color, serif fonts, active voice in navigation elements, whitespace, center orientation — you've pretty much run down the list of the top web design trends of 2009.

You could argue that a Bush website that launched today wouldn't be as good because he's behind the times, but I disagree. I don't think any web designer today (working for the President, no less) would put together something like the old White House site. It's just not done that way anymore.

Let's address the elephant in the room: maybe we like the website better because we like Obama better.

The Presidential reality-distortion field

Obama has a good brand— a very good one. So good, in fact, that it has spilled over into what people think about his website. Perhaps that's the real story here?

I applaud the effort to get newspaper readers to think more about the design they encounter online, but I hate to see personal politics get in the way of what could have been a more objective discussion about better page design.

Thursday, I'll speak a bit on another reason this article misses the mark: poor graphic design.

See you then!

We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Designing a restrained billboard might be rare, and even culturally antonymic, but when it's done right, it's incredibly effective.

Billboard Advertisement for the Denver Water Public Utility

Here, the Denver Water Public Utility takes the Eskom strategy one step further, actually chopping their billboard down to about 20% of its allotted size. This is not only highly effective because it capitalizes negatively on our perceptual fluency for billboards, but it's also quite apropos to the content. Nicely done.

Billboard Advertisement for the BIC

Secondly, this incredible billboard for BIC razors makes excellent use of many of the principles we at DLB hold dear. Specifically, (1) the aforementioned confounding of perceptually fluent expectations, (2) the Power of Profiles (here, capitalizing on the unique and recognizable shape of the BIC disposable razor), (3) the judicious use of the context/environment of the design, and finally (4) a very interesting (sculptural) complication of the figure-ground relationship.^*

All these excellent factors add up to an almost completely blank billboard. Chew on that.

^* Please note also my near-giddiness that this billboard allows me a second occasion to use the Claes Oldenberg tag.