The Information Design Manifesto
Information is for the mind. Art is for the soul.
The information designer forges these two into one.
Why?
Because information alone is sterile, and art without truth is hollow.
Because the world drowns in data yet starves for meaning, and the holy fusion of truth and beauty is the only remedy.
Information designers stand at the glowing forge, shaping a new golden age of visual communication.
Our work informs the confused, inspires the listless, and delights the doomers. We ignite curiosity and wonder, guiding people through vast oceans of information toward clarity and understanding.
Principles
Be real, then good. Our responsibility to inform demands authenticity first and excellence later. Our obsession with quality means we don't ship until our work is bulletproof, with minimal ambiguity and nothing left to add or remove.
Details are everything. We invert the 80-20 rule: 80% of our effort is on the tiny details, because they separate remarkable work from good work. We care for every pixel, pigment, and interaction, knowing that big things attract people but small things keep them around.
Find zen in the Venn. We are polymaths, our toolkit an interdisciplinary overlap of software, colour theory, cartography, geometry, psychology, storytelling, interface design and data science. We are specialists in being generalists. We wield creative technique and technical creativity.
Resist entropy with elegance. The world only gets more complex: history only gets longer, datasets larger, technology more sophisticated. There is ever more to learn, and it gets ever more complicated. To protect society from the onslaught of complexity, we find signal in the noise and explain it with simple visual elegance.
Liberate good data. Terabytes of valuable data remain trapped in prisons of academic reports and government databases. It's our responsibility to deliver justice and set them free.
Champion inconvenient truths. Most people have data trust issues. They will ignore new information, even irrefutable information, if it contradicts their existing beliefs, identity, or investments. Disguising the evidence with good design helps it slip past the brain's security system. Faced with beauty, a soldier lowers their guard and opens their mind.
Get to intuition. Emotion drives behaviour more than knowledge—just ask the unhealthy doctor. Good design doesn’t show people data, it makes people feel it in their bones. Incidental learning during an immersive activity moves information to intuition. Visual explainers, stories, and games transform cerebral understanding into instinct.
Reject soulless work. Business intelligence dashboards are the antithesis of our work—corporate spreadsheets in cheap suits. We reject their bland designs, bloated code, suggested charts, and janky interactions.
Abstract thoughtfully. Information design is a portal that connects reality to its abstractions. It connects the macro to the micro and vice-versa. Let the part tell the whole to reduce cognitive load, but maintain nuance and balance.
Respect your data. Data is vulnerable to misrepresentation. Always provide context and never mislead. You may disguise it but never beat it out of shape or stretch it beyond its limit. Your job is not to speak for the data, but to allow it to do the talking.
The call
Information designers create meaning by making sense of the world.
The forge beckons to the alchemists who can turn information into golden understanding.
Your precision and creativity are essential services to humanity.
Come make sense of what matters.