I went to the Tate site today and a little UN-style gathering of flags caught my attention.

What really bothers me about what the Tate have done here is that they’ve obviously put some thought into this design decision, but the logic behind the decision is broken.

They’ve realised that using the Chinese flag for Chinese might be a bit politically sensitive (to say people form Taiwan or Singapore) and that there is no standard recognisable flag for Arabic — so while Arabic and Chinese are presented as the name of their languages, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Japanese and Italian users are given flags.

Swiss users in particular must love this scenario: they must choose the French, German or Italian flags (or stick with the English!).

Why not just list all the languages like you did with Chinese and Arabic?

I wonder if there’s some obsession with flags that overrides the logic behind such a decision. A few possible thoughts:

1. we love flags because they’re graphical and a strong visual metaphor
2. they take up less space on the screen, therefore are seen as advantageous
3. they’re seen as ‘instantly recognisable’ therefore being more usable
4. we don’t want to ‘confuse’ other users by showing scripts/languages they won’t understand

Any other thoughts as to what is behind this enduring phenomena?

The reasons that make flags such powerful and strong symbols are exactly why they’re so bad for representing languages: you are coercing users into identifying with another country in order to proceed to content in their native language.

One is a flurry of ‘infographics’ around the web. Just like rounded corners and shiny buttons went viral earlier last decade, this time it seems to be print-style high-res graphics choc-full of eye candy and numbers.

Two is a recent reaction against observation number one. Tom Morris for one launched a somewhat one-sided but justified rant; on the flipside, Connie Malamed talks semantics about what an infographic is, and even coins ‘infoposter’ as a better description of infographic’s less refined relation.

Can we really give a name to all these formats? Should we judge them? I’m personally at the point now when I see the term ‘infographic’ I usually prepare for disappointment. I find it really interesting that on Edward Tufte‘s website, there’s hardly any reference to the word ‘infographic‘; and where it is mentioned, it’s not by Edward Tufte, but from other people emailing questions etc.

Edward Tufte talks about information design, graphic design and even art. Data visualisation, infographics etc. are all examples of these — and in the bigger picture, just one part of telling a story. Conveying understanding. Sometimes a video is the best medium for this; sometimes a picture. Sometimes an audio clip. Sometimes an graphic. Would you call one of Hans Rosling’s videos on health in developing nations an infovideo? No, that would sound silly.

A graphic is a graphic, and with any other medium, it’s only as good as the artist behind it and the understanding they have of the subject matter — regardless of what you call it.