Information design manifesto
15 August, 2025
Information is for the mind. Art is for the soul.
The information designer forges these two into one.
Because the world drowns in data, yet we are starved for meaning.1
Truth and beauty together are the remedy. For information alone is sterile and art without truth is hollow. Information designers work to forge and shape the new age of visual communication.
Our work aims to inform the confused, inspire the listless, and delight the doomers. We aim to ignite curiosity and guide people over vast oceans of information toward clarity and understanding.
Principles
Be real, then good. Our responsibility to inform demands authenticity first and excellence later. Our obsession with quality means we don't ship until our work is bulletproof, with minimal ambiguity and nothing left to add or remove.
Find Zen in the Venn. Our toolkit is an interdisciplinary overlap of software engineering, colour theory, cartography, geometry, psychology, storytelling, interface design and data science. We are specialised generalists with creative technique and technical creativity.
Champion inconvenient truths. Most people have data trust issues. They will ignore new information, even irrefutable information, if it contradicts their existing beliefs, identity, or investments. Disguising the evidence with good design helps it slip past the brain's security system. In the face of beauty, people lower their guard and open their mind.
Get to intuition. Emotion drives behaviour more than knowledge – just ask the unhealthy doctor. Information designers don't just show people data, we make 'em feel it. Information learned during an immersive activity becomes intuition: visual explainers, stories, and games transform intellect into instinct.
Liberate good data. Terabytes of valuable data remain trapped in prisons of academic reports and government databases. It's our responsibility to deliver justice and set them free.
Reject soulless work. Business intelligence dashboards are the antithesis of our craft – corporate spreadsheets in cheap suits. We reject their mass-produced insights, bland designs, bloated code, suggested charts, and janky interactions.
Details are everything. We invert the 80-20 rule: 80% of our effort goes to the tiny details, because they separate remarkable work from good work. We care for every pixel, pigment, and interaction, knowing that big things attract people but small things keep them around.
Fight entropy with elegance. The world only gets more complex: history only gets longer, datasets larger, technology more sophisticated. There is ever more to learn, and it gets ever more complicated. To protect society from this onslaught of complexity, we find signal in the noise and explain it with simple visual elegance.
Abstract thoughtfully. Information design connects reality to abstraction, the macro to the micro and vice-versa. To disguise complexity with design is not to bend the underlying truth. Let the part tell the whole to reduce cognitive load, but maintain nuance.
Respect your data. Data is vulnerable to misrepresentation. Always provide context and never mislead. Your job is to set the stage and let the data do the talking.
The call
Information designers! The forge beckons.
Your precision and creativity are essential services to humanity.
Come make sense of what matters.