Gates Foundation and NYTimes graphic design

Thanks to Kay for sending me this Feb 2008 interview - he answered submitted reader questions, I don't know what to call that but an interview- with Steve Duenes, the graphics director at the New York Times.  This came up as Kay and I were talking about visual display of complex information - something that I need to do as I'm writing Chapter 4 of my dissertation and something that she's been researching for a couple of years.

One reader asked "What do you consider the best examples of NYTimes graphics?"  Duenes' answer emphasized consistency, the need to do well on simple graphics as well as the "splashy" ones.  I can't imagine a more powerful example than the one he gave, from writer Nick Kristof:

in september i traveled with bill gates to africa to look at his work fighting aids there. while setting the trip up, it emerged that his initial interest in giving pots of money to fight disease had arisen after he and melinda read a two-part series of articles i did on third world disease in January 1997. until then, their plan had been to give money mainly to get countries wired and full of computers.

bill and melinda recently reread those pieces, and said that it was the second piece in the series, about bad water and diarrhea killing millions of kids a year, that really got them thinking of public health. Great! I was really proud of this impact that my worldwide reporting and 3,500-word article had had. But then bill confessed that actually it wasn't the article itself that had grabbed him so much -- it was the graphic. It was just a two column, inside graphic, very simple, listing third world health problems and how many people they kill. but he remembered it after all those years and said that it was the single thing that got him redirected toward public health.

No graphic in human history has saved so many lives in africa and asia.

I'm sending you a copy of the story and graphic by interoffice mail. whoever did the graphic should take a bow.

nick kristof

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The person who took the bow is Jim Perry, a veteran graphics editor who has produced a long list of consistently good graphics since he started here 1980. The process required to develop a good graphic revolves first and foremost around the quality of the information, followed by finding ways to organize the information clearly.

You can't even make up stuff like this.

John at Social Design Notes found the print version of the article and posted scans of the graphic in question.

Comments

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