Online Design

March 1995

 

Information Intersection

by Cary Tennis

From books to CD-ROMs to Web design, vivid studios brings raw data to life.

A framed diagram showing four concentric circles hangs in the conference room at vivid studios; printed inside the circles are the words, "Data," "Information," "Knowledge," and "Wisdom." Nathan Shedroff, the company's creative director and erstwhile spokesman, is standing before the diagram.

"Data is just dumb, inert stuff," Shedroff says. "We create information from data, and then we create experiences with that information."

Outside in the gray San Francisco morning, traffic rushes to the Bay Bridge. We're in Multimedia Gulch, where traditional design meets hi-tech; where you don't just look at design, you interact with it; where not only computers, but books, have interfaces.

Founded in 1990, vivid has designed on-line interfaces and CD-ROMs, World Wide Web sites, books, kiosks, manuals, and custom projects. The company's mission, Shedroff explains with a sweep of his hand toward the diagram, is to bring the intersection of those four terms to life.

 

Cover to Cover

Across all those different media, the company stresses, well, vivid representation of information. In Understanding Computers, a book Shedroff co-authored with J.Sterling Hutto and Ken Fromm, the designers sought to graphically represent how computers have freed designers to present information according to its intended use and to treat information as a web or network of interconnected facts and ideas.

What you notice about the book is that it simply starts right away. There's no title page, no author acknowledgments, no page to tell you what book it is you're reading -- the designers take for granted that the reader already knows this information.

And of course, that's not at all the standard way to approach book design. Take, for example, a new book from a well-known publisher of technical and computer books. The inside of the cover is blank. The fist page contains the title of the book. The back of that sheet is blank. The next page has the title again, along with the authors' names and the publisher, which you already knew from the cover and spine. Then there's publisher information, a recycling statement, the table of contents, a list of figures and tables, a preface...the book itself begins 36 pages into the book.

With Understanding Computers, you open the cover and you're there. The book starts on the back side of the cover: Contents. Right there, in color-coded format, are the categories of information about computers one might want to know "Uses" is violet; "Components" is green; "Technology" is tan; "Evaluation" is blue. The back matter is purple.

Inside the book, important words and concepts are cross-referenced for further explanation or study. The design looks busy at first because it's extremely active, but it isn't confusing; the text is clean and sparse, supporting the design. According to Shedroff, the whole concept grew out of an examination of a single question: What is this book supposed to do? The answer coalesced on whiteboard diagrams into running themes with important cross-references. Then they simply designed the book around the answer.

 

New routes for new media

Another example of vivid's approach to innovative information design is Voices of the '30s, an educational interactive CD-ROM about America's Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and westward migration.

A major goal of Voices of the '30s was to give students an interactive experience that led them beyond the classroom material and into the broader world of ideas and experience. To help accomplish this, vivid's designers took a common complaint about technology use in the classroom--that students get caught up in the interaction with the machine as if it were just another video game--and used it to their advantage. Games allow players long-term entry into another world but give them only short-term activities to perform: shooting and running, fighting and winning. In Voices of the '30s, students are encouraged to linger in the time period with time-intensive activities such as newspaper articles researching or holding discussions about prejudice, economics, or poverty.

"Voices of the '30s isn't baby-sitting material," Shedroff says. "It's specifically designed to give students procreative activities."

The disc also has a unique ability to grow and change through use. Unlike a textbook that simply wears with age or collects anonymous doodling in the margins, Voices "is a living database. It gets better with time the more it's used in the class, because people add to it, they put in their own commentary," Shedroff says. Since a CD-ROM by definition cannot be written to, vivid programmed into the interface a "route-maker" function that allows the user to save to the hard drive a list of locations on the CD-ROM. (As a nifty added feature, the route-maker also allows students to create electronic book reports.) It's a simple device from a programming perspective, but it allows users to go beyond mere content navigation and participate or create if they choose.

As Shedroff puts it, "People really like creating things. Most of the things that interest them in their lives are things they can participate in or create. And that's what electronic media should be doing."

 

Moving among media

As one bit of information can point cleanly to another, one design strategy can inform another. From studying video-game design for the Voices project, vivid moved into some consulting work for Sega Corporation. "We don't normally chase video-game development," says Shedroff, "but this interface project came up and it was a great thing to work on. It just invigorates your thinking. And there's great value in that."

Shedroff explains that it makes fiscal sense to work on products that provide royalties but that smaller interface-consulting projects can further expand the connections between media. With that in mind, vivid is currently concentrating on developing graphical interfaces for sites such as The Well and Delphi and on designing World Wide Web sites for commercial companies. And just as vivid's book designs are influenced by its electronic-media designs, so are its Web designs influenced by traditional design considerations.

The Borland Web site, for instance, sports the clean look of a high-quality printed brochure. Attractive and colorful, the site emphasizes clarity, simplicity of organization, and ease of access to information. By contrast, the Sony Electronic Publishing site is a high-spirited, MTV like, and very high-tech, using round button-like icons as design elements. Such a design is in keeping with the name of the home page, Brain Candy, and the products SEP is outing: CD-ROMs such as the Haldeman Diaries, ABC News Interactive Earthquake, and the disc-based magazine, Substance Digizine.

vivid also designed the Web site for 3Com, the maker of global data-networking solutions. The 3Com site, like the Borland site, boasts a clear, concise, and orderly interface appropriate to the businesslike dissemination of accurate information.

"Companies have no end of information about their products and services," says Shedroff. "So it's a really great challenge for us to deal with multitudes of information on the Web, with the severe limitations visually, in layout and organization, and then to market to a worldwide, global audience."

And once vivid designers tackled the problem of getting around in cyberspace, they of course had to use that information to help people get around in the real world.

The Sony Navigator, for which vivid designed and documented the interface standards, is an in-dash CD-ROM-based navigation tool that allows both driver and passengers to view maps and related travel information. It communicates with a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) to give users their precise location.

Say you're on your way to a restaurant. You've located yourself with the Sony Navigator, but you're not sure if the restaurant is still open. So load your copy of the Digital Restaurant Guide into your PowerBook, type in the restaurant name, and it tells you how much time you have before the place closes. The Guide, produced and written by information designer Mark Beaulieu and a group of gourmands known as the Precision Dining Society, rates over 3,000 San Francisco-area restaurants not only on overall performance but also such things as coffee quality and the wine list. Many listings include menus, as well as prices, descriptions, hours, and parking availability.

All of which brings us back to that diagram with the four interlocking circles and the words "Data," "Information," "Knowledge," and "Wisdom."

Applied to the above situation, the diagram might be interpreted in this way: What time the restaurant closes is data. The current time is also data. Combine them, give them context, and you have information: how long you have to get to the restaurant.

Combine that with your location and the restaurant's location, and you have an idea of whether you can make it or not. That's knowledge. That knowledge may lead to one of two experiences: You get to the restaurant and eat, or you turn around and go home. If you go home, perhaps you will be the wiser for it. But if you go eat and the food is sublime, well, that may be a form of wisdom, too.

Taken with a grain of salt, of course.

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