About these things

I’ve been working, teaching, researching, reflecting and writing about information design for a long time. This is a collection of ideas I’ve found interesting and useful, and which I’d like to share.

It won’t teach you to design, but I hope it will help information designers who are reflective practitioners.

Many people arrive at information design from another profession, where they’ve come to realise how important clear communication is for health, law, finance, management, technical writing, education, or government. I hope they will get insight from these pages that they might not find in design textbooks. In fact, this project started as a way to put some of the teaching from the Information Design Summer School online – including the theory cards we used to quickly relate real world design problems to relevant theories.

It’s inspired by similar collections I’ve found among architects: for example, Matthew Frederick’s 101 things I learned in architecture school. (see Things to know).‍

I’ve designed it for how, it is said, people read today – you can browse and skim-read, and move quickly to related ideas through links in the margin.

And I’ve designed it for how I like to write – in blog-length chunks. So I haven’t attempted to build an argument in the proper linear way hoping someone will read it all the way through.

I’m not entirely sure what genre this belongs to – I think of it as a book, that in paper form might devote a spread to each topic. So an e-book then.

The site is still under development (and probably always will be). I am still working to copy-edit the citations, and to check accessibility (which is a huge challenge and grey area for information design that relies on format). Here is a link to a list of topics still in preparation.

Please get in touch with your comments and suggestions to rob@designthings.org

Rob Waller, September 2025