This information graphic is a homage to Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe. And at least as long as his famous Seagram Building, so i had to split it in two parts. It informs about his life and his contribution to a new approach of
architecture, the New Objectivity. It was introduced in the 20's in Germany. As
a symbolic change, artists seeked clear forms after the playful period of Jugendstil, dated before the First World War.
So it is self-evident the
infographic gathers the values of simplicity. Furthermore, it reminds of an American 50's adverisement - the main period of van der Rohe's producing. This manner of designing graphic seems to be quite popular in the last years, so it can't described as innovative.
It uses big shapes, easy to
identify, such as van der Rohe taking his famous position, smoking a cigar. The background is held very clearly and
lightly. There only a few colours used. Similarly, information is well organized in a time-line using icons to
illustrate the personality’s life-stations. Important facts are emphasized
bold, and the different colors of typography raise the readability. The graphic
does without much decoration. However, it exhibits a few redundancy. Thus some
of the depictions of the buildings he created are shown twice. The content
quite unidimensional, only dealing with his architectural producing. So it does
not need a high effort to understand the graphic, but surely it demands some interest for the topic.
Graphic source: http://www.archdaily.com/220679/infographic-celebrating-mies-van-der-rohe/
I agree with you that this graphic is rather dense, but very well organized. But what strikes me most about this graphic is the fact that is has more text than graphics. In my opinion, an information graphic should show the information instead of telling it with words. But it is of course a question of the purpose of the graphic. If it's designed for a news paper to illustrate an article, it doesn't need that much text, because the reader can get the context from the article. But if it's published on the internet (with no additional text to explain it), it might be good with a little more text inside the graphic.
ReplyDeleteHey, criticising the high density of text is a valid objection. However, concerning this very specific topic, it could be hard to illustrate some facts by graphics.
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