Information Design with Edge and Cheek

What we’ve learned from the 40-year design career of Peter Grundy and a new book by Richard Brath

Claire Santoro

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Nightingale

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Newsletter

4 min readNov 5, 2020

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re likely used to thinking about how to distill a clear message from complex information. But can you do that using only…construction paper?

That’s essentially the approach of 40-year design veteran Peter Grundy, whose iconic illustrations embrace a bold, cut-paper style while tackling topics as complex as the human brain or London Gatwick Airport.

This week, we were lucky enough to be able to catch up with Grundy, a London-based information designer working under the name Grundini. His work in the field began in 1980 when he co-founded Grundy & Northedge, a firm focused on using visual communication to explain, not sell. Here, he answers our three questions:

Three Questions with… Peter Grundy

1. If you could be any type of chart, what would you be?

I’d be a star chart because, after forty years in the business, I can consider myself so. [Ed. note: We agree!]

2. If you were stuck on a desert island, what viz would you want to create and what would you use to make it?

If I was on a desert island it would be to get away from ‘VIZ.’

3. What is one visualization that has inspired you?

Le Corbusier (the architect) created the ‘Modulor’ based on the human form, in conjunction with the golden section, as a directive of proportions for reference in his and other buildings. It was this diagram that inspired me as a student to be an information designer.

Write All About It!

Have you always wanted to write for Nightingale but couldn’t think of an idea? Then, you’re in luck — sometimes we have story ideas, but need a writer to bring them to life. Right now, we’re interested in a piece (or pieces) about the physical nature of data visualization. For example, the kinds of work you see at museums, e.g., the size of a human heart compared with the size of a single blood cell. Or, the work of the dedicated dataviz team at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Or, a review of the Sagan Planet Walk. You get the picture. Submit your take on this idea by emailing it to pitchnightingale@gmail.com with the subject line “physical dataviz.”

In the Wild (Other Cool Stuff)

Here are some dataviz and dataviz-adjacent items that we thought were worth sharing:

A dataset on US voting equipment by Verified Voting

Downloadable posters from the Laws of UX “visualizing” 20 common user experience rules for designers

Work & Co’s redesign of the New York City subway map

The Axes of Uncertainty, a tool from the Future Today Institute for helping prioritize work in the face of uncertainty

In Case You Missed It …

Peter Grundy on Informative, Fun, and Elegant Design

For more from Peter Grundy, check out Sarah Steimer’s interview, in which she asks about his approach to educating his audience, how he got started, and how the field of information design has evolved over the course of his career.

Map of Gatwick Airport in England — Map of Gatwick Airport by Peter Grundy

Where Data Meets Literacy

Grundy’s work is iconic for its simplicity, but what if you prefer to move away from color and shape and instead visualize with text? We have inspiration for that, too! Last week in Nightingale, Alec Barrett reviewed Richard Brath’s new book, Visualizing with Text, to show us how text can be used not just to explain visualizations, but also as a form of visualization itself.

Example of visualizing with text (Figure 5.2 in Brath’s ‘Visualizing with Text’).

Looking for even more reading material? Don’t forget that the Data Visualization Society has a crowd-sourced list of favorite dataviz books on the resources page.