DesignFilter. Help me poke and prod my nondesigner's mind to consider new ways to present that hackneyed standby of the elementary school social studies textbook, the timeline. Too much information inside.
Through through a combination of happenstance and sheer luck, I've been asked to be a part of a book project headed up by a Very Big Deal Novelist. It will feature contributions from a panoply of Very Big Deal dTitans of Culture and will be forged and burnished into something visually extraordinary by a Very Big Deal Designer. As a historian by training, my little corner of the project will be to compose a set of timelines related to various elements of the book. The timelines will run throughout its pages, making a journey through the text alongside the reader.
The project hangs upon a very tight link between form and content. So while the project is in the early stages, and the VBDDesigner is waiting for more material to work with before coming up with formal comps, I suggested that given this close relationship between text and visual presentation it might make sense to collaborate from the get-go, since design considerations will inform how I select and summarize events for the timelines.
We're conference calling sometime later this week. I am nervous. To put it mildly. Actually, to massively understate the case.
I don't have any illusions about my talents and limitations in this department, particularly given that I'm working with someone who is breathtakingly talented and accomplished. In other words, I know that the VBDD will have a) the ultimate say and b) far better ideas than I will. And I also know very little about how this whole process works, as far as steps and sequence and parameters etc. go. But I want to get a booster shot to think about different ways to present the information in the timelines and, more broadly, to have a sense of what world the VBDD inhabits and what sorts of places his mind can go.
While my bailiwick here is relatively small, it will assert a presence throughout the book and, in its own way, provide visual and intellectual structure for it. Another part of the background check that's looming rather large right now is that I am A Far Cry From Anything Resembling a Big Deal, and I also happen to be at a professional impasse which has me rooting around for what I might look like in Version 2.0. And so despite its modest scope, I'd very much like to try to take this opportunity to kick ass and present my ideas and myself as something and someone worth taking seriously (vis a vis this project and perhaps in the Department of Future Gainful Employment).
I'm all aflutter at the change to challenge myself to work with a new kind of conceptual framework, and to radically rethink how I'd normally go about piecing information together using a different set of considerations for how to tell a story and how to think about representing time. But as anyone who has languished in grad school knows, disciplinary training often has the unfortunate effect of refining one's analytical skills by placing constraints upon them. It strengthens certain muscles while atrophying others, and this can impair one's ability to think broadly and creatively- or, as a management self-help book for sale in an airport bookstore might put it, "outside of the box."
So while I like being an initiate into the cult of Clio, but I need some help making myself think in an alternate language. Historians know how to do certain things very well- such as find, filter, and make sense out of large bodies of complex information. I think this is part of what designers do, but by tackling different kinds of problems through different means. So I'd like to get started by doing some thinking about how considerations of design might inform and shape my collection and presentation of the information I'm going to track down.
I have already lit candles in front of my hastily assembled Edward Tufte shrine, but suspect that the design junkies in this crowd have some favorite bookmarks on their browser that might help me out. I'm thinking of the timeline equivalents of
this but with data points as events rather than dead French soldiers or the gingerbread supply on the Salyut 6. I'm thinking of and hoping for images along the lines of
Cabinet's history of timelines . Book titles- for models history-wise and design-wise- very much welcome, since I'm going to be spending a considerable amount of time in a nicely appointed university library with a decent design collection.
As always, my deepest thanks in advance for the collective wisdom.
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Does the timeline have to sync-up with the action on the pages? That is...if event X is being discussed on page 203, then the timeline on that page should also match that period.
Or, while the timeline relates to the text, can it exist as its own entity, flowing as it needs throughout the book?
posted by Thorzdad at 1:33 PM on May 2, 2007