A Well-Designed Budget

Where do our taxes go? The budget submitted by the president every February is publicly available, but why sift through thousands of pages of government documents, when a designer can create a comprehensive information graphic to explain it all? Designer Jess Bachman created "Death and Taxes," a 6-square-foot infographic that organizes the budget into an amazing bubble diagram (available as a poster and online). Agencies are assigned their official seals and scaled according to the program's annual expense. A percentage change is also given in spending from the previous year--helpful in understanding our last president's priorities. Bachman has her work set out for her for the 2010 budget design.

Lettering the Body

Peter Chmela wanted to get physical with his work. His "Don't judge people according to their appearance" is a subtle, yet powerful photography project. My favorites: "judge" (yay fingerprints) and "appearance"; I thought their legibility and context were the strongest visually.

Brochure

Type treatment, illustration, and sophisticated silver/light gray for this brochure complement the idea of a sparkling, bubbly drink. Designer unknown.

Designs You Want to Touch

Lizania Cruz is a graphic designer who currently lives in Philadelphia (she finished her BA at Philadelphia University and now works as a graphic designer for Anthropologie). I love the tactile and delicate element she adds to her designs. Samples below include a discount/sewing kit sent to select Anthropologie customers as a birthday gift, an identity for Anthropologie’s bedding collection (designed in collaboration with Anthropologie’s in-house design department), and the concept and design for a clutch bag made out of a FedEx Tyvek envelope.

More than Nutrition Facts

Instead of relying on a nutrition facts label smacked on top of your beautiful design to speak of its ingredients, why can't we express your product's healthy contents through the packaging itself? Japanese industrial designer Naoto Fukasawa is one step ahead. He created a series of fruit juice packages where the packaging mimics the color and texture of the actual fruit skin. These designs are definitely not from concentrate.

Bathroom Signage

Recent Yale MFA graduate Aliza Dzik is helping you mark your territory by marking her own. The use of continual type across both the women's and men's bathroom doors is a witty visual experience and an example of successful abbreviated signage. Still, it says a lot about how we process information that understanding the signage would not have been nearly as immediate if the type was the same color on both doors.

Typography Gets Scientific

Hydrogen... Helium... Lithium... Gotham? Students have diligently analyzed the periodic table of elements hanging in classrooms for years, and design-wise the table has served as what is actually a long-lasting example of information design. Why not present a history of typefaces the same way? Like elements, typefaces also have specific properties, compositions, ways that they can be grouped (families etc.), and can produce "reactions" of sorts when used together. While I don't expect this Periodic Table of Typefaces to be hanging in mac labs anytime soon, the table lists 100 of the most popular, influential, and notorious typefaces today. The typefaces are grouped first by families and then by classes of typefaces (sans-serif, serif, script, display, geometric, humanist, slab-serif...). Each typeface cell has a logical symbol and also the designer, year designed, and a ranking of 1 through 100. Rankings were based on combining lists and opinions from a few other sites. A larger image of the entire periodic table is available here.