Time for a haircut?

A little while ago, I wrote here in statistical terms about a trip to my local supermarket.

1 item every 60 seconds. $5 every minute.

And even a brief browse through Freakonomics or their blog will quickly reveal just how much statistics relate to our everyday lives.

All of which brings me to the fact that I got my hair cut the other day. Not a particularly glamorous or extravagant event, as evidenced by the fact that it was a mere snip at $13.

I entered the barbershop at 8.03am.

I was seated by 8.04am.

And I was on my merry way by 8.17am.

$1 a minute.

Not so long ago, I used to get my hair cut at a salon. And, it used to cost me $47 and take about 45 minutes.

Also, $1 a minute.

And when I think about how long my beautiful wife will tend to spend at the salon when she has her hair done, it's generally a 3-hour exercise at a rough cost of $200.

Close enough to $1 a minute.

I'm sure by now you get my point, or at least my hypothesis. That there is no such thing as a cheap or an expensive haircut, only a long or a short one (at an approximate cost of $1 a minute).

Drugs, data and rock 'n' roll

A few months ago, I wrote here about the way in which information is presented, and I included some of my favourite infographics.

Since then, people have written to me with some of their own favourites, and I thought I might end the year with the pick of the bunch. (And, of course, thanks to all the usual suspects – Good, Information Is Beautiful and 99%, among others.)

It's probably best to let them speak for themselves.

So here goes for 2009.

Drugs....

...data...

...and rock 'n' roll.

6 weeks later

Earlier in the year, a good friend pointed me in the direction of what is both a very curious and very productive social experiment in branding.

It's called 6 Weeks, and it's a project by a chap called Paul McCrudden.

Paul took it upon himself to measure the amount of time he spent with brands over a 6-week period (on his blog and using Daytum). And then – and this is the best bit – sent each of those businesses an invoice for his time.

,

£531.25 to Transport For London for time spent on the Tube.

£17 to the Royal Mail.

£97.75 to Sainsbury's.

And a host of others, including £25.50 to his local café, the Squat & Gobble. Who actually replied with the gift of a voucher.

As did Cranberry, EAT, Little Chef, Pizza Express and Pret A Manger with a variety of offers – and even actual payments.

Personally, this is my favourite branding idea of the year.

It prods and pokes the relationships that brands build with their consumers. It questions the value of those relationships. And it asks brands to recognise the value of not only their portfolio of products but also their share of consumers.

Paul's also gone to the trouble of publishing this summary below so that you can get the full story.

From Paul's perspective, the opportunity lies with better understanding PR and, in particular, social media. But I actually think there are bigger issues here that are fundamental to the role of branding in the 21st century.

But hey, it was his brilliant idea, not mine, so what do I know? All I need to do is get my invoice in the post.

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.