Simian Design

Too bad its mostly anecdotal "it makes sense to me and I'm an expert!" type of stuff.

I don't think so. It had a couple of different viewpoints than what I had thought of before. It is a broad-based overview on what Information Design in, and ways that Information Designers work.

I thought it was a good read. I didn't get the sense of "Oh look at me I'm so smart". I got the feeling of a firm grasp on many different aspects of Informational Design, many of which I was not even aware of.

I still recommend it, as I recommend most of the Boxes and Arrows articles. I stand by my original position. A very good read.

Sorry, I should have been clearer, I was referring to information design, not the article.

Okay, that I can somewhat buy. Many of these areas are not clearly understood by business.

But I have had success in showing examples of a graphic before I worked on it, and then the final result. It was clearly more informative and demonstrated the point they were trying to make much cleaner.

The key in showing the value of information design is to try and find out WHAT is trying to be said, and WHY. If you can get quanatative values to measure this against, even better. If not, you can still succeed, it's just a little tougher.

Informational design is tough.

My main forays into informational design have been in the realm of graphical representation of information, charts, graphs, graphics. Not so much the writing. (because I couldn't write my way out of a paper bag).