Often times I get discouraged, doing what I do. I mean, I design user interfaces and I document them so that people more proactive than I (The “Do-ers”) can build them. It’s a cool job; I love what I do and I don’t think that many people can say that about their jobs. All I do is visualize the end-state of what the team is trying to do—it’s touchy feely with a lot of pictures, diagrams, flows, etc.

How important is all of this?

I found this wonderful article in the ThinkTank section Adobe.com’s Design Center called: Seeing is believing: Information visualization and the debate over global warming

When Roger Friedman of Fox News said in his review of Al Gore’s recent film on global warming, “It doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, your mind will be changed in a nanosecond,” he wasn’t referring to scenes of Gore reflecting on the meaning of life before a slow-flowing river or even the images of glaciers collapsing or polar bears swimming in the open ocean in search of vanished ice. He was talking about a particular graph shown in the film that depicts the variation in temperature compared to the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last thousand years. Whether or not you accept the claim put forward in “An Inconvenient Truth” that the earth is getting warmer as a result of human activities will rest in large part on how you respond to this one slide.

This paragraph is perhaps the most telling:

“Your brain is hardwired to process visually first and then verbally,” Duarte said, when putting together graphics for a presentation, “the goal is to communicate instantly. You’re looking for impact.” This, then, is the “nanosecond” that Roger Friedman referred to in his review. Images and graphs can communicate immediately and, given the choice between words and images, we look to the images first.

All is right in the world.

Tai