When I first looked at the Dr. Bronner’s label, I thought, “I wonder if Gene Ray was using this stuff when he made up his Time Cube diatribe?”. Go to Gene’s website, www.timecube.com, for more “info” on “Nature’s Harmonic Simultaneous 4-Day Time Cube”.
It has to be combined with good zoom functionality. If it had that, this type of interface would work well. But, most of today’s interfaces aren’t navigable via zooming. It’s all paged and context-driven.
If you had a 36000 page phone book presented densely on a single page, it’d be easy to find what you wanted via browsing if you had access to tools that facilitated whipping across and around the image and zooming in and out quickly to inspect the detail.
I love when people claim a product isn’t animal tested just because it is so old, no one alive remembers the tests. Chances are, far enough back, someone tormented animals, or even slaves to ensure the product was safe. Centuries later, we get all warm and gushy because we don’t know the details, and frankly, don’t WANT to know.
That is ONE massively pointless wrapper though. I understand why cereal boxes have lots of writing, but are you really going to read the bottle/box/dispensor of soap as you use it? I kinda doubt it. I suppose if you forget a magazine it might be handy tho.
Say, aren’t you commiting a hideous copyright violation by posting a scan of their product packaging?
I have to say that this is a pretty stupid arguement. Everything about it is relative. I mean, think about it. If there was someone who was looking to find as much about this guys soap as he possibly could, of course he would want to have something like you see above. It doesnt make any sense whatsoever in another situation. I mean, how often do you go online with those intentions. For instance; if someone wanted to find a specific fact about that soap, or just anything in specific, a table of contents or something like that corresponding to a library-like webpage would be much more effective, regardless of the efficiency.
What I’m not understanding are the benefits of having a page like that other than having all of the info right in front of you, even that which you dont have any use of.
Tufte is wrong. Period. There are two goals of visual display interface:
- To present all the information.
- To acheive maximum information consumption.
The first is limited on one end by MAX density (the most words / pixels possible) BUT on the other end by amount of display available.
1-1000 paper pages describes all the printed letters and books to 99.9999% of the universe.
With that limit in place, density at least might be a forced good - the author / publisher can’t afford more atomic costly pages, and he can’t achieve greater word economy - then and only then do you study Tuftes method from cramming in an organized fashion.
But when the amount of display avialble approaches infinity - he’s just being snobbish and dumb.
Add-in the use of technological advances towards KNOWING and PREDICTION… and he’s not worth the display in front of our eyes.
People don’t LIKE to read. They might believe it is good, but like eating vegan food - there has to be an unobvious END beyond the immediate notion of ease and comfort. Chocolate and TV are easy. They are also both powerful.
I’m right - because in the real world, no can even hint that reading is better than TV for serving BOTH functions above. Because reading sucks and people hate it.
No one can pretend that feeding users the “exact right thing next” doesn’t blow the doors off, “here it all is - hope you’re as smart as Einstein!”
Because YES - we must provide all the info Einstein would demand - but KNOWLEDGE is meant to be easier for the next smartest guy to learn BECAUSE of Einstein. And the next and so on…
It is actually pathetic and so un-romantic for the dumb old to try and eat the smart young - the old are over, all thats left is the pattern they build into the future for adaptation.
Tufte is selling a dying breed into an exclusive club of “remember when” that admires themselves while they die.
I kinda thought that the purpose of communication was to impart something (knowledge, emotions, transcendence, etc.) from one consciousness to another.
How you do it (highly verbal/information density or highly visual/information density or highly olfactory/…) is dependent on two things: 1) what tools you have to communicate with, and 2) the intended audience–flashing graphics may have as little effect to a blind audience as shouting would to a deaf audience.
It’s interesting that nobody’s mentioned that background can impart as much information as foreground. Whitespace can help transform singular points of data into patterns that convey information with lower boundaries of perception and shorten the distance between sender and potential receiver(s).
I guess it’s as simple as remembering your message and your intended audience–regardless of the medium the message is being transmitted through. Of course that presumes that both you and your audience share enough commonality (an information-dense presentation in Etruscan is less likely to be understood than a simple line drawing).
you suck lOSER u have no good info bitch
My take on it:
Content/Information Density = Good
Interface/Task Density = Bad
If I’m simply looking for information, then when I find it, I want to receive as much of it as possible.
However, if I’m just trying to get something done, I don’t want to be bothered by 50 buttons that do things I’m not interested it.
I don’t mind scanning (skimmimg?) information, but I really hate having to scan an interface, and I think that’s true for most people. The rules for content-based websites are different from those for Web Applications, be they “Web 2.0” or “Old School”.
This is why I think the MS Office guys are really onto something with the ribbons. Context-sensitive tasks. Don’t bother the users with things they don’t want to do, and instead leave as much room as possible for the actual information (the document). Now all they need to do is extend the Direct UI, as is (sort of) done in Visual Studio, Refactor Pro, etc.
Very interesting!A dyzzying mix of occasionary striking prose and logical coherence.
Yes I think that this is a very important topic especially because of the up coming presidential election. I came here because I am preparing an article on the terrible communication style of Democrats. Perhaps they just want to be polite but their political statements have such a low information density as to make it appear that they are lying. It seems that like Bronner their style of communication is meant to serve as a way of identifying themselves as members of a certain in-group. I love Bronner’s labels but they are not statements of fact. They a used to identify Bronner as a person who has an interest in ancient texts. I love his soap and trust his product because he is my kind of person. As for the Democrats they often make true statements but do it in a style that alienates about ninety percent of the electorate.