Information Graphics

Information Graphics

In1994, well before most and probably all members of this class were born, Ron Howard directed a movie called “The Paper,” which looked at 24 life-changing hours in the life of a fictional New York City tabloid and the people who worked there.

At the time, I was new to a larger newsroom myself, and was keen to see how accurate the movie was; Hollywood ideas of the journalism industry are often pretty off-base, like when Drew Barrymore is a copy editor (at the Sun-Times no less) who has her own office in “Never Been Kissed.” (She might even have had her own assistant.) It turns out that, in many ways, “The Paper” is a realistic and gritty portrayal of life at a major metropolitan daily, starring long hours, a good deal of swearing and the exhilaration of chasing the big story. It’s one of Ron Howard’s better films.

I was a little disappointed, however, to find that the only mention of graphics throughout the film’s 112 minutes involved the editor’s displeasure at a drawing to accompany a story on a certain kind of surgical implants (“It looks like a map of Florida.”)

Disappointed, perhaps, but at the time I was not all that surprised: Even to many working reporters and editors in the mid-90s, a newspaper’s graphics department was a quiet and isolated place where aspiring artists played with crayons and toys and wore berets, a place where real newspaper workers would go if they needed a “doodad” to make a page more “lively,” maybe, but not a significant part of the serious news-gathering going on elsewhere in the building. Indeed, for most of my career in journalism, I (and my colleagues in the graphics departments in which I’ve worked) have fought against this perception.

Three decades on, you don’t need me to tell you that the media landscape has changed drastically from the time “The Paper” was made. Changes in technology, the habits and desires of the readership and, indeed, the world economy have forced forward-thinking news organizations to rethink every attribute of their business — including how they go about presenting the news. Fortunately for those of us who are advocates for visual journalism, this has presented a greater opportunity for information graphics to take their rightful place in the still-vitally-important world of journalism and to become a more prominent part of the presentation of news in almost every format.

What’s more, the buzz phrase “data visualization” is heard frequently, not just in newsrooms but in many other industries as well. As the amount of available data has exploded, so too has the craft of using visual means to make sense of this data. Well beyond supplying a small piece of background in a one-column space, detailed, expansive and visually complex Information Graphics are presented in a variety of ways, from large posters and books to animations to interactive online presentations. Whereas a 1994 movie might have seen graphics as a means of adding a little “eye candy” to news pieces, they are now a meaningful and often indispensable tool of serious journalism and visual storytelling in a wide variety of media.

It is from this perspective that you will learn how to conceive, research and produce this kind of work this semester.

Welcome to J464!

My goal is that you will leave this class with a solid understanding of what constitutes an effective information graphic as well as the ability to render a variety of different types of graphics, from serious news stories to light-hearted features, from the clear and direct to the complex and engrossing.

You will learn the history of graphics, their prominence in today’s media and their promise for the future. You will develop and refine your visual skills, enhancing your ability to illustrate and design so that your graphics have maximum impact and help readers/users better comprehend important events, draw in the curious with essential and arresting visual information and lead them skillfully through complex data in a logical and appealing way.

We will focus on building skills to report and write for graphics, using programs like Excel to create revealing data sets that we can turn into charts. We’ll isolate key information and focus on how best to convey that information in a visual way.

In this class, we will concentrate on developing your fundamental knowledge of reporting and producing information graphics. Our primary tool for the former will be Adobe Illustrator. Don’t be concerned if this class is your first exposure to this program: we will undertake a series of exercises that will allow you to master its basic functions, from creating shapes to drawing diagrams with the pen tool to using and manipulating its charting functions. In the semester’s closing weeks, we will explore some online applications, like Highcharts, Flourish, Raw and Google Charts, to provide you with some experience creating interactive graphics.

If this sounds scary today, worry not: Learning any skill, from playing an instrument to speaking a language, requires practice. Sometimes a lot of practice. To truly incorporate a skill means you must practice it to the point that it can be performed without your thinking about it. Mastering computer skills removes the barrier of your being concerned with making a program behave the way you want it to, so you can devote your full intellectual capacity to creativity. As you are undertaking new tools in this class, please remember: everything can be learned, and in a class like this, learning new skills will open up worlds of possibilities.

A brief word of caution, however, about the magnificent machines that will be your primary tool in creating your graphics: learning computer skills is not the primary goal of this course. Virtually nothing I learned in college about now-obsolete software is of great value to me now — except that mastering Micrografx Designer (in 1990) taught me how to learn software. While we will spend a good deal of our time learning how to use programs, it is learning the principles of graphic journalism — the ability to identify and represent information in a compelling visual way — that will prove more valuable. This is a “hands-on” course, and you will make much use of your computer in J464. But the computers are only a part of the equation. This class will stress the importance of responsible and intelligent journalism along with the importance of developing your ability to produce high-quality visuals.