Looking for clarity, I rang up renowned graphic designer Nigel Holmes. No one explains things better.
Since his time as graphics director at TIME Magazine –- and even before — Holmes has specialized in explaining complex data, visually, verbally and always with a sense of humor that makes complexity approachable.
Take, for example, a project he’s just finished for Good Magazine that will be handed out free at Starbucks on Thursday: It’s an illustrated timeline in poster form titled “It’s the economy, stupid” and it outlines “how our temperamental economic machine works.”
Well-timed.
Here’s the first of several interviews with Holmes.
SARA QUINN: You’ve always been able to make very complicated things understandable — that’s what you’re known for. What tips do you have for explaining big, scary things … like the disastrous U.S. economy, for example?
NIGEL HOLMES: That is a huge question. It is the question. And I don’t always get it right, I have to say.
When I am trying to explain the size of really large numbers, I try to relate them to something human, because doing that gives people a context they can understand and remember. And it can be fun.
Can you give me an example?
HOLMES: For instance, a stack of one million dollars, in $100 bills comes up to your waist. It’s an approximation, of course (the exact height is 3′ 4″), and some people are taller than others; Michael Jordan would have more than a million in his stack; Austin Powers’ Mini-Me would have less.
I have seen you position people on stage or in a classroom to show the surprising relative distances on a timeline of the world. Is it the scale that makes it an effective illustration?
HOLMES: Even really large numbers can be brought down to a human scale. Take this example. At a recent lecture, I tried to show the enormity of the amount of money outstanding on mortgages in the US. It’s $10.4 trillion.
I gave an audience member a helium balloon with a 20-foot string attached to it. She let the balloon go up to 20 ft (it was a high ceiling!). Then I asked another audience member to lie on the floor next to the balloon lady, and hold a piece of card that measured a quarter of an inch high upright on the ground. At the same scale as the balloon 20 feet above it, that piece of card represented one billion dollars. You could see the scale of the huge number very clearly.
Someone in the audience knew a billionaire. He told me he was going to think of his friend’s wealth in a different light. (Remember when a billion was a big number?)
Context is important when describing the size of things. Saying that something stretches all the way to the moon (roads, dollar bills end-to-end, whatever) isn’t as effective as showing the numbers with a human element. Who’s our audience here? Space aliens? No. … humans!
How do you get started with a really complex topic?
HOLMES: I had a mentor a long time ago who gave me some advice that may not have been the right advice, although I thought it was at the time. His principle of explaining things was to put as much stuff in there as possible, because some of it would ring a bell with somebody and other people would just ignore parts of it.
He likened it to walking into a store. You don’t buy everything, but everything is there, in case you want to buy it.
I think that works, in a sense for total magazine design. But it doesn’t work for specific projects that need to be explained.
But, the more I do this, the more I think I wish I wasn’t doing this in print -– but in some form of animation or film. Not so much interactive, actually. But something with sequences that people can go back to, but that they are led through.
In other words, I still want to have control of the order that people read things in. But I don’t necessarily want to show it to them all at once. So that people can take their time and something can sink in.
This is sort of like the Vampire energy graphic that we talked about.
It has a linear storytellling method to it. You’re guiding people through the story.
HOLMES: Right. And I think I have a very linear mind. That’s why I added the proviso about interactivity, which is where people can go off in their own direction.
I don’t know how to control that. Well ”’ that gives me away straightaway: saying that I don’t know how to control it. I seem to want to have control. I think that people ought to find out things in a certain order. Because I think that’s the way they’re going to understand it.
Please tell me about the poster that you’ve done that explains the U.S. economy.
NIGEL: That didn’t look like that when I started it. It was much, much simpler.
The dilemma is, with a complicated subject, if you simplify something so much, then you actually might be leaving out something that matters.
So, it’s a balance between how much readers-viewers-users -– how much can they stand before they turn off and say, “Oh, to hell with it!”?
For this project, the editors kept loading more and more stuff onto the poster. Now, the timeline goes back to 1920, and it shows the National Debt, the Gross Domestic Product, and it talks about the stock market, inflation, the deficit, the haves and have-nots, along the bottom. There’s a lot of detail.
The timing of this is good. People everywhere are talking about whether or not this economy is as bad as during the Depression. This sure gives a good sense of what has come before.
HOLMES: That’s all that we originally set out to do. It was to create a cheat sheet for all of these things that you don’t know about –- or that you think you know about –- words that people are sort of throwing around.
The research that goes into any project like this is how much of it? Two thirds of the work? Three-quarters?
HOLMES: Absolutely. At least three-quarters of anything I do today –- at least three-quarters, is the text — the written text, explaining the story in the clearest way possible. The figures and drawings are very simplified.
