Raw Data
More than 70 infographic designers open their sketchbooks to share a detailed look into their creative process
Steven Heller invited us to co-author Raw Data with him as a follow up to Typography Sketchbooks, that he wrote with Lita Talarico. For Raw Data, we interviewed and collected the works of seventy-three talented designers from around the world. We were less interested in analyzing and presenting the final work—instead, we celebrated the plumbing—the sketches, doodles, prototypes and process. As a real bonus, we had the incredible privilege to see original sketches for the NYC Metro Maps by Massimo Vignelli.
The content of the book is organized alphabetically and uses a minimal typographically driven wayfinding folio system throughout for the introduction of each of the designers featured in the book.
The intent of the design for the book was to create a richly layered experience by featuring the designers sketches in a graphically compelling way. We were not trying to be didactic in showing a step-by-step, how to experience; instead we wanted to try and show a lot of variation in sketch-based thinking across a lot of different types of work.
We interviewed and gathered content from over 70 diverse designers from around the world. One of the highlights of the research, gathering, and writing phase of the book was having access to a library of sketch and process for the 1972 New York City MTA map from the Vignelli office including works from associates Yoshiki Waterhouse and Beatriz Cifuentes.
The range of use of information design by designers and artists featured in the book is broad, I was particularly taken by the work of artist Nathalie Miebach who has been translating weather data into 2D and 3D musical scores (which also happen to become the foundation for dimensional sculptures). I’ve always had a certain affinity for record keeping and documentation and Nathalie’s work incompases this at a whole other level.
A graphic contextual index was created organizing the work into categories and representing the quantity of work within each of the categories. Raw Data was also translated into both French and Japanese with custom covers developed in the spirit of our US and UK editions.
