Short is sweet

The most effective design is often the most immediate.

So it's no wonder that one of my very good designer friends would rather the same was true of some of my longer blog posts.

In his world, short is sweet. Short hair. Short black. Short sleeves. Short board. Sweet.

Now perhaps I shouldn't pay too much attention to him given that he's off to work in Paris. However, that would also be to ignore the global language that brands create, even if you've only made it as far as Perth.

No economy of words could ever match the power that is represented in a single stroke or swoosh when it symbolises something as influential as a brand like Nike. The brand's identity acts as a shorthand that cuts across countries and cultures, allowing individuals to translate its meaning for themselves without having to dive into the dictionary.

So, as a parting gesture to my Parisian-bound friend – and at the risk of neglecting those of us who aren't about to start intensive French language classes – it seems right to recount the thoughts of Blaise Pascal, a 17th century mathematician and philosopher. In his words, "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte". Obviously, he hadn't heard of just do it.

Brain freeze

This week, I had the dubious pleasure of listening to one of advertising's self-professed elders parading his special brand of insights into the wired world of web 2.0. However, having left his credibility back in the early 90s, this was no pleasurable task – neither for him nor his audience.

After a shaky start, an in-joke failed to rally the troops, and things quickly went downhill as he struggled to work his way through a selection of video material. By the time he came to reveal his big strategy play, a minor PR disaster had to be narrowly averted as he showed an ad starring a cast of people who were completely naked. If presenting an ad from 2007 under the banner of his latest thoughts wasn't bad enough (or maybe that was when he had his latest thoughts), why he felt this the right forum for full frontal nudity was the only thing left to the imagination. A few sombre shakes of the head from the back of the room brought the presentation to a swift conclusion.

For those who missed out, here was his 3-step strategy for success.

1. Find the funniest videos that other people have already uploaded onto YouTube.

2. Pay the videos' creators makers as much of the client’s money as possible just to have their logo added to the end frame.

3. Upload this brand new video to YouTube.

That was it. I'm not kidding.

The end of the presentation could not have come quick enough, and I soon found myself in the back of a cab, sliding through the city in the mid-morning traffic. I slumped into the seat, and waited hopefully for some feeling to return to my brain.

Casting the wrong spell

I have often waxed lyrical about the power of language and its rare ability to convey both emotion and conviction – whether as "a spark for the imagination, a call to action, or the prose of persuasion".

And I have just as often bemoaned the fact that, in spite of this, most people "default to the drearier corners of the English language".

However, there is a third dynamic worthy of mention, if only to warn you against its teasing tones. A dynamic that practically obliterates all grammatical sensibility for something far more sensual and alluring. And that is the sultry switch from perfectly adequate and innocent letters like "c" and "s" to something all the more enticing in the oh-so-chic shape of "k" and "z".

It is with more than a touch of irony that I write this. In fact, I find this sort of thing equal parts loathsome and banal, and rarely has my ire been so spurred as when I saw an ad for KFC Krushers on the side of a bus this morning.

Krushers. Real bitz.

It's not particularly youthful, "cool", or credible. And I can't imagine it adds any audience appeal. It's the equivalent of writing something pretty unimaginative in Comic Sans in the blind hope that it will be transformed into a moment of pure comic genius.

Do KFC think today's youth are dyslexic? Or perhaps, they will be so overwhelmed by the "totally unique" experience of this "taste revolution" that only the mild shock of such atrocious marketing can possibly bring them round to their senses.

Data is not dull, you are

It was Raymond Loewy, the renowned industrial designer, who once said "the most beautiful curve is a rising sales graph". And he may well have been right.

However, the information we communicate is not always quite so easy on the eye, let alone anything that comes close to being "beautiful". To my mind, sensible spreadsheets and po-faced pie charts only exacerbate mankind's weakness for convenience over character.

But the real poster boy for plain boring must be PowerPoint.

A few years ago, I discovered this PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address. An exercise in demonstrating just how far PowerPoint can reduce one of the most inspiring speeches of all time to a rubble of drab and dreary slides. And please don't get me started on clip art.

That said, the other extreme does exist in the form of David Byrne's creative use of PowerPoint as an artistic medium. However, it's not quite the same as using PowerPoint to share basic information, as most of us do on a day-to-day basis. And herein lies the real challenge.

Now I should say I’m not advocating that everyone rush off to design school (although a basic eye for aesthetics might be nice). But what is important is that we all take a moment to consider the poor people who have to wade through all this information that we feel compelled to emit. Because we have to remember that the only reason we ever communicate is to create a response – in the words of one of my favourite writers, the late, great F. Scott Fitzgerald, “You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say".

If you communicate because you feel a purely self-motivated, almost evangelical calling to communicate, then go ahead and write 100 PowerPoint slides in 8 point. And help yourself to as much clip art as you can possibly find. In fact, go crazy with the clip art.

But if you choose not to follow this path – and trust me, it is a choice – then you need to think more carefully. Not simply about what you want to say, but more about how you want to say it so that your audience think or feel something in response.

And that’s why I love any software, applications, widgets and websites designed to show information in surprising and delightful ways.

My current favourites are Daytum and Information Is Beautiful, where some of the most mundane data gets presented in some of the most creative and thought-provoking ways. All of sudden, you see how data can take on the character of the story that you want to tell, not simply report the facts and figures in a statistical but ultimately superficial way.

Both take their inspiration from designing information in a way that can help us understand the world around us. David McCandless, who started Information Is Beautiful, describes himself as a visual and data journalist "with a passion for visualising information – facts, data, ideas, subjects, issues, statistics, questions – all with a minimum of words". And with an equally fervent hatred of pie charts.

To show you what I mean, here's the "Billion Dollar Gram" by Information Is Beautiful, which highlights the relative amounts of money spent on all sorts of different bits and pieces.

When you view data through a creative lens, McCandless describes how it can reveal hidden patterns, insights and stories, which strikes a similar note to how Nicholas Felton, Daytum's founder, describes his start. He began by producing yearly tabulations of his life which he called Annual Reports, "a collection of charts and graphs that concentrate the year into statistical chunks and illuminate his life in a wry but rigorous manner", and he then sourced the help of Ryan Case to evolve his basic methodology into a platform for self-expression.

This is the front cover of the 2008 Feltron Annual Report, the early springboard for Daytum.

There are probably more examples out there, but these both brilliantly exemplify not only the statistical value of communicating information in such an engaging way, but also the aesthetic advantage of their approach, one that elevates the end result in every way.

As it happens, Sydney design studio Toko also took inspiration from your typical set of statistics for their design of the annual report for "The Hague in facts and figures". To the point that they transformed the various charts and graphs that you would associate with your average annual report into visuals that could be read either as statistically-accurate graphs or stunning works of art.

What's more, some of the graphs shown above were also produced as canvases and displayed within their work environments. Yes, real art on real canvas.

As I wrote earlier, communication is only ever about creating a response, not simply tossing information into the ether while you sit back and wait for something – anything! – to happen. It really does come down to that age-old adage, "The more you put in, the more you get out". Which basically means that if you take a boring approach to the way you communicate, you will be rewarded with nothing more than a bored audience.

Data doesn't have to be dull. So nor do you.