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148 things an information
designer should know^*

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Design & transforming

Things to know: about this genre

Information design

The reflective practitioner

Optimising vs transforming

Quality simple vs quantity simple

Surface simplicity

As simple as possible but no simpler

Christopher’s kettle

Complexity is not the enemy

Bloom’s taxonomy

The quality without a name

Professional practice

Professionalism

Connoisseurship

It’s just your intuition

Theory and practice

Find a champion

Magic and logic

Institutional illiteracy

The Law of the Penultimate Solution

Thinking past the visual layer

Jan White: this is so obvious that it hurts

International Institute for Information Design

User-centred or human-centred?

Books, heroes, history

Books, heroes & history

Image of the city

Ken Garland and First Things First

Dr Hessayon’s Expert guides

From Heap to Skeleton

Harold Evans’s Pictures on a Page

The London tube map

Reading & cognition

Processing load

Sentence processing

Relevance theory

Strategic reading

Memory, understanding and use

Tractable information

Reading with a pencil in your hand

5 seconds, 5 minutes, 5 months

Document literacy

Situated literacy

The rights of the reader

Born under a bad sign

Cognitive accidents

NOT-reading, and NOT-remembering

Distracted reading

Hostile reading

Stressed reading

What an architect means by reading

People don’t like maths

A book is a book is a book

I have not read or understood

Context & conversation

World knowledge

The cooperative principle

Sharing control: turn-taking

B2B, B2C and other TLAs

SBAR: structuring difficult messages

Cooperative media

Customer journey map

Different chairs

Documents as places

Moments of truth

Customer touchpoints

Information design is not sticky

Helena’s pocket lawyer

Welcome to the United States

Writing & language

Genre: One of these or one of those?

Basic level language

Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em

The curse of knowledge

Graphic editing

Layout as punctuation

Semantic line breaks

The Pyramid Principle

Metaphors for communication

The conduit metaphor

The presumption of memory

Visual perception

Gestalt principles

Similarity principle

Proximity principle

Closure and continuity

Just noticeable difference

Figure-ground illusion

Colour perception

Design patterns

Design patterns

Icons and symbols

What journalists call headings

Access structures

The three layer model

Typography & layout

Typographic voice vs hierarchy

Text typography

Choosing a typeface: the character set

Serif vs sans serif

The right hand edge

Font, fount or typeface: what’s it called?

Typographic detail that surprisingly matters

Fixed, flowed, fugitive, fragmented

Page, column and line breaks

Testing & research

Just noticeable research results

Research stimulus: professional, realistic?

A science of information design?

Commutation tests

Recent research shows...

Low tech legibility tests

Testing with users

Testing – common in advice; rare in practice

The squint test

Critiquing design

Essence, accident or ornament?

Design pattern critiquing

The infrastructure layer

Information as theatre

Risk legibility

Nutrition Facts vs the Schumer box

Information design and aesthetics

Plausible distractors

Pops, heroes and violators

_* according to Rob Waller

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