Cultural Stereotypes

Some thoughts while watching Jonathan Jarvis’s movie ... (see last post below).

At one point he describes typical, responsible Prime-Mortgage customers: man, woman, child, dog. Just before he got to the Sub-Prime customers I briefly wondered how he would visualise irresponsible customers - and got exactly what I expected: lots of children, parents smoking and obviously out of shape, all very disorderly.



This reminded me of how strong our cultural stereotypes are. How else would one draw a pictogram of “irresponsible people”?

How do we picture ourselves? A German design agency - kognito - has sent out a questionnaire to look at cultural pictograms, here is the current state of the vote for different “pictonalities“. The left column shows the country of origin of the voters.

GOOD Magazine Makes Sense of the Financial Mess

A competition for the best infographics on the current financial crisis got some beautiful results. Take some time and enjoy - you may learn something new!
More on GOOD.

And the winner is .... a static version of this great video:


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Correct graph, wrong visual message

Reading the header about rising budget deficits and looking at this - correct - graph showing the negative development forced me to actually think about what I was seeing first thing in the morning.

7 am with only half a coffee I'm not at my best, but it was interesting how wrong the visual felt even before I had started to look at the actual content.

One more case in point that visual communication is not an issue in Austrian print media, it's a way to break up the text and to give a semblance of "seriousness", of factual information.

It's sad that quality print media here, who are struggling to survive anyway, have still not embraced the power of good information graphics.