Last week, our corporate bank paid us a visit. It is one of the few institutions that is still considered a safe haven following the financial crisis. We spoke about this and that. At the end, I received their current annual report. After leafing through it, I became a bit pensive: The color red is part of the bank’s corporate identity. And all headlines were red. For example: Credit volume, Account deposits, Business developments, Results of operations, balance sheet, Profit and loss, Personnel. All in HKS 13 red.

Black numbers written in white on a red background: Enough to make any business professional skeptical. In this case, without due reason. Source: Sparkasse Nuremberg, Annual Report 2009, page 48.

For old-school business professionals, that is a definite no-go. After all, red differentiates good numbers from bad ones. Business people try to avoid having numbers ‘in the red’. A person who colors black numbers red, therefore, is suspicious and is definitely not a business person.

I didn’t like our bank’s breach against convention but considering that the rest of the annual report was highly positive, I was willing to overlook it. Since they are not a publically listed company, they don’t have any private investors who in times like these react a bit more sensitively to real or alleged warning signals. At E.ON or Vodafone that’s a completely different story. These companies also chose red as their corporate color – and both their words and numbers are consistently in the red right now. Bella has already poked fun atE.ON’s investor information. All of its columns, bars and lines for investments, prices, dividends as well as capacity expansions and cutbacks were colored red. Someone there obviously realized that Bella was right. The ‘bloodshed’ has been reduced in their current annual report.

In comparison to that, Vodafone’s annual report is a horror show. Every number – no matter how good it is – is colored blood red in huge type print.

Large numbers; large and red. Source: Vodafone Group Plc, Annual Report for the Year Ended 31 March 2010, page 1.

It’s not just local banks, E.ON and Vodafone who dabble too heavily in red. It’s also publications like Die Welt, FAZ and the Wall Street Journal. The Journal, for example, always uses the color blue for the first value and red for the second value in charts – no matter what the content is. Each time I read the paper, I have to take a closer look to see if the second value is really worse than the first one.

Die Welt is especially bad at turning everything upside down. The time series lines for the Dax, Dow, euro and oil price on the first page of the finance section are generally red while the start and end values of the series are black. The percentage change compared to the previous day is blue when it increases and red when it falls. It’s a good thing that paper is so patient. That’s why it can cope better with the fact that all stock developments in the business section are red.

All indexes are blood red – regardless if they rise or fall.
Source: Die Welt, 2010–07–20, page 13.

That made me think back to my grade school days. Our teacher Mr. Kling always repeated the same saying until we committed it to memory. Substance and form make up the contents. That’s why wheat beer doesn’t taste good in a soup bowl. And that is what causes such a widespread misunderstanding. The context decides where the CI color fits and where it doesn’t. I don’t have any problems with Vodafone service technicians driving red cars and wearing red overalls with a red corporate logo on their chest. But then again, I don’t want to see every board member wearing a red suit at the annual press conference either. And just because the German postal service is yellow, using yellow as a font color – which would be completely illegible anyway – is no proof that they are using their CI consequently.

While working on a human resources project in Switzerland, I learned that it doesn’t have to be that way. We were asked to adapt our reports to the company’s CI – but ‘naturally’ doing ‘everything that is possible and feasible’. Its CI was subtle, tasteful and well thought out. I was almost jealous. It suited its original purpose – namely: to support the company through typography, tonality and color. You could really feel the bonding force in the company as well as its efforts to adapt its business to the very different needs of its international clientele. The pastel tone of the colors exemplified that the company doesn’t exclude anything or anyone, it accepts and respects other people and things – and doesn’t let itself get carried away with an evaluation or devaluation. For reports that deal with personal sensitivities, we could profit from this CI. Because when we want to show subjective views in a hard, clearly separated way, we signalize precision where there is none to be, where it may not or should be. For the reports on team and management levels, we took the liberty that the client gave us and delved away from the CI to use clear, simple colors and forms instead.

In the past, I often checked back regarding the usage of CI. The controlling department often said that marketing had decided that those were the valid design guidelines for the entire company. Hmmm. When I then asked marketing if that were true, the team was perplexed. Business standards always precede design guidelines. They obviously completely misunderstood what marketing had wanted. Okay. When successful companies color good numbers red, that is a loss for controlling and not a win for marketing.

A few weeks ago, we celebrated the fact that sportive sparklines were published in the June edition of Traffic News-to-go. For the July/August edition we tried another format: line sparklines the way that Edward Tufte suggested using them.

Showtime: The premiere for sparklines at the Fashion Week in Berlin.
Photo left: Traffic News-to-go.

This time it was a bit more difficult, but we succeeded. And we learned some things along the way. Newspapers will need to learn a few things, too, if they want to take advantage of the exciting possibilities that sparklines offer – which is something that we have encouraged them to do for quite some time now.

1. Producing sport sparklines for a newspaper was relatively easy. Back in 2005, we created a special typeface called ‘SparkFont’ which consists of thousands of characters for different columns and line segments. A font, of course, prints in character width – and that is fine for dichotomous sparklines like the ones we used to show the soccer results. They only consist of simple rectangles – one above for won games, one below for lost ones. Line sparklines which are used to show e. g. exchange rates or stock prices, however, need to contain a lot more data. And that, in turn, requires graphical formats that compress the data more effectively.
   
   Writing with Sparklines: As seen in the July/August edition of Traffic News-to-go.
2. Sparklines don’t break well. The complete sparkline and the number following it all belong to a single row. We had to reword our copy or change the hyphenation in other places to avoid breaks in the sparklines. For newspapers, that means they will have a bit more challenging work before their deadlines. Without sparklines, all you need is linguistic talent to cut or add words to offset any arising gaps.
3. We contemplated long and hard which length we should use to show the euro exchange rates as sparklines. After all, we are presenting time frames ranging from six months to more than 10 years per sparkline – which means that the time frames can differ by a factor of 20. We couldn’t apply Bella’s law of proportion because the shortest sparkline would have been 4 cm and largest over 80 cm long. That’s nonsense. That’s why we decided: It would be easier to identify and compare patterns if we used the same length for each sparklines.
   
   These sparklines look much better on newspaper than on screen …
4. The text surrounding the sparkline has a lot of work to do. Since legends or footnotes don’t work here, we had to embed the cumbersome information for the time frame and for the time level (e. g. year, month) in the text itself. That’s hard to pack in a single sentence. As you can see in the sample text above, we solved this problem by breaking down the content into several sentences. (And in case you can read German, in one section it should say 6 years – not 8.)
5. There are two types of sparklines: If we want to focus on the current number, the sparkline will show us how far away we currently are from the historical minimum and maximum. What we want to know is the current number – and it is located at the end of the sparkline, in other words, on the far right. If we want to analyze a development and pattern, we also want to know what the starting value is. That, of course, is located at the beginning or on the left. Our examples show that we sometimes need to deviate from pure doctrine to avoid a linguistic hassle.

Writing with sparklines is challenging and arduous – but the results make the extra work worth the while. As a comparison, read ‘Women and Cancer’. This article is considered to have a high information density because some chapters have a ratio of 13 – 24 words per ‘number word’ (i. e. years and values). Our text contains about 500 words – and the sparklines were drawn from over 10,000 values.

Back in the summer and fall of 2005, in my euphoric verve for sparklines I called a large German publisher for business newspapers multiple times. My request: Since publishing companies are generally afraid of the Internet, I thought they might want to try something new that wouldn’t work well in the Web due to the poor resolution – namely to paint sparklines. Thereby we could proof that paper has a future – as long as we print on precious paper something that is worth the effort. They thought it over, thought it over some more, and decided against it as of today. In the meantime, the same company even relaunched one of its major publications, also without incorporating sparklines.

Yes, we can: Sporty Sparklines on paper, in the June edition of Traffic News-to-go. Next to Jeff Koons.

As a reader of various newspapers, I soon had the impression that many publications started to counter the drop in advertising and circulation by cutting costs in the wrong places – namely by hiring less-expensive authors who, in turn, spent less time researching and writing their poorer stories.

That depressed me so much and I decided to let Bella handle the missionary work with the press from thereon in. What sparked my interest again was when Murat Suner, a good friend of mine back in grad school, became co-editor of Traffic News-to-go.

Murat, whose family comes from Istanbul, was already quite a pioneer in his earlier days. Together with a few likeminded students, he founded a highly respected organization that was dedicated to convincing the European elite that the cultural differences between the Orient and Occident don’t have to lead to the clash of the civilizations as many believed back at that time. The German newspaper FAZ also recognized and honored its work with a front-page story in 1993.

Sparklines in the same size on paper, however, are crystal clear. In the Web you can only read them partly and enlarged.

Traffic, which debuted back in December 2009, was already honored by the Lead Academy as a “Newcomer of the Year” in March 2010. This monthly publication is handed out at no charge from Traffic newsboys and girls sporting traditional knickerbockers and caps and is available in select locations in Berlin, Hamburg, Zurich and Amsterdam.

Together, we decided to reflect on the advantages of paper and do something that was long overdue: to print sparklines in a newspaper. And we did that for the first time ever in Germany in the June edition. As appropriate for this time of the year, we focused on soccer and used the dichotomous sparklines that Edward Tufte first introduced to us.

We created the sparklines using SparkMaker, a tool which anyone can use to test sparklines since 2005, and wrote sentences that used the miniature series of wins and losses as adjectives or verbs. For example, we described the path to Bayern Munich’s current championship title as . A medio– cre start with few losses quickly led into an inspiring midseason series of wins – the longest of any team this season as a quick glance at the other patterns in the table shows.

We described our observations and delivered the evidence right next to them. This new kind of argumentative cross-linking is so exciting and enjoyable because it challenges our minds. There are some things that just belong on paper and others that belong in the Internet – like this blog, for example.

I was faithful to my Nokia 6820 for a very long time. Even after Nokia had abandoned it and the stores no longer had them in stock, I purchased two used devices so that I could extend the product lifecycle of this cell phone species for a couple of years. A short while back, however, I surrendered and belong now to the iPhoniacs, who after a car crash would first move to see if everything was okay with their iPhone.

We all wish that smartphones could be small computers. And above all, I expect computers to be designed for typing. My 6820 was really nifty in that sense. Thanks to its pocket format, slidable keyboard and otherwise clean design, I could quickly send short e-mails (i.e. text messages) and easily jot down ideas and thoughts. Plus, I rarely ever made a typo.

Unfortunately, that is not the case with my iPhone. So far, it seems that I do more deleting than typing. Two letters ahead, one letter back. When I’ve discussed this problem with other iPhone users, they simply shake their heads in disbelief and ask how long I have been using it. When I tell them ‘two months’, they simply chuckle lightly, pat me on the shoulder, and say that I will get used to using the keyboard soon. My iPhone doesn’t get along well with my car, the voice quality is a step down from my Nokia, and there are a few other objective disadvantages that sometimes annoy me. But I love it – unconditionally.

As the iPhone’s big brother, the iPad, was launched in Germany, I was probably the first to buy one. (Hehe.) In fact, my growing dependency on Apple products is beginning to scare me. I almost feel that there is something totalitarian about it. I don’t like it but I simply just can’t resist. Why are two black panes of glass – one as small as a phone and the other about the size of a computer – suddenly so fascinating to so many people? What is it about those shiny screens that are constantly smudged with oily streaks from typing, pinching or wiping with our fingers? Right that is the reason itself.

Wanting to touch the things that we see is a human trait. (A scene from the movie “Avatar” copied from this music video.)

Do you remember that scene from Avatar when Jake taps a dragonfly-like creature which suddenly lights up like a firefly and takes off like a helicopter? With the same innocent gesture of childlike curiosity, Jake touches trumpet-like plants that recoil from the size of a grown man to a tiny, little hole in the ground. Jake enjoys this so much that he continues to touch all of the plants until they have disappeared into the earth.

Our index finger likes to touch the things at which it is pointing.That is nothing new. Touch screens aren’t new either. What is new, however, is that Apple has incorporated even more human gestures into the way that we work with computers. Most animals cannot oppose their thumbs to their index fingers. Humans, however, can and we do it rather well, too. Our entire manual ability depends on this special anatomic function. Apple uses this typical human opposition for an analog gesture that satisfies our most outstanding mannerism – the search for insight. By spreading our thumb and index finger apart or moving them together on an iPhone or iPad, we can zoom in or out of the content that we see. We change detail, size and scale – all of which are important building blocks in the realization process.

James Cameron’s parable of the Na’vi, the aboriginal people of the planet pandora, living in tune with nature, also applies for modern mankind. We also want to become in tune with our computers. In order to do, however, our computers must become more analog. Using cultural techniques, we have been able to communicate with computers for a long time. We first learned to speak, write and then type. The mouse has also made our relationship to computers much friendlier. It has extended our index finger. In fact, clicking a mouse is just an abstract way of touching something. Nevertheless, keyboard shortcuts are and remain the fastest way to communicate with a computer. The perceived simplification of using an iPhone or iPad also means that something was designed to be simpler – in the sense of being more primitive. But that also involves more work. As far as Business Intelligence is concerned we realize: The archaic paradigms for usability will inspire us to create an even more user-friendly and tactile interface for report consumers. If this will inspire us to create a better interface for report authors we still do research.

Last Friday, I joined a longstanding customer for lunch. She is a top talent, which is why she has ascended as a woman to the executive ranks of a very large DAX company. The many long, hard years that she spent building her career, however, have been sobering. “We are constantly being faced with new requirements that take more and more responsibility away from us – and that on a very high level in our company,” she said rather pensively.

Things that are decided in rooms like this have a lot to do with management – but little to do with steering. And steering is really nothing more than adapting – every day, on every level.

We examined the underlying reasons – as well as we could over fresh sardines wrapped in kelp – and both agreed that the situation apparently isn’t something that the current managing directors simply let happen. It is an enormous administrative body that independently works with politics and the public in a Kafkaesque manner – and will endure during the tenor of the next three management boards as well.

Over sautéed turbot on a bed of artichoke leaves, we discussed who actually controls this huge corporation. “It’s not the managing board,” my customer spurted out. We looked at each other in dismay. Is that true? Don’t any directives from the managing directors reach the people making day-to-day decisions? Aren’t more and more decisions being made directly where the company is making money – every day, immediatetly, in little bits and pieces? We ventured a peek into other disciplines.

Over lukewarm salmon, we asked ourselves in an evolutionary-biological sense if nature as our greatest opponent had ever rewarded us for any other reason than merely adapting to circumstances. The idea that we somehow could actively steer something on our own didn’t seem to fit. So what can we steer, and how? We can only steer a sailboat to a desired destination by reacting to the wind, the current and the swells with permanent correction. Markets, customers, competitors, politics and prices for raw materials cause both strong winds and waves for a company.

Over hare – which according to the maître would come to the kitchen door spontaneous – we agreed: Due to these different forces, there is little room for anyone to steer anything. And after a glass of Hochheimer and the second glass of an Austrian Sauvignon Blanc called “Don’t Cry”, it suddenly came clear to us: One’s ability to steer decreases with the ascent up the corporate ladder, not vice versa. Those seated at the top cannot change whatever has already been done below.

Consequently, a term such as ‘corporate steering’ hardly exists in business text books. The common term is ‘corporate management‘. That also implicates that managers need to clearly convey to their staff time and time again and on all company levels: Those who are willing to adapt will survive. Over entrecôte and Argentinean wine we came to the following conclusion: Managing directors have the power because they establish and mediate a system of compensation, which rewards adaption, and motivates and inspires to it.

Over crème caramel with fresh berries and shortly before a cup of coffee, we agreed: We both have come very far when it comes to dissecting the status quo of a company. But we still have quite a lot to do before we can realize who needs to do what next. In this case, what we need most are performance indicators which measure a company’s ability to adapt. Yet there aren’t many that show that. Which opportunities did we have – and have we used them?

The maître d’ then asked if we cared for any fine chocolates but we declined and simply asked for the check. At this hour, the roads would still be clear – and we adapted ourselves to the situation.

About four weeks ago, a colleague entered my office and announced ecstatically, “’Die Welt’ printed its first sparklines!” He was excited – as was I. With great suspense we bent over to examine the March 16th issue of the German newspaper. The longer we looked, the longer our faces became. Why?

This table shows the March 15, 2010 stock price, the dividends in euros for 2000 – 2009, a time series chart, the dividend yield in percent and the dividend continuity for the thirty DAX companies. Source: Die Welt, March 16, 2010, page 15. – Click to enlarge.

Because:

1. When we create a small time series chart, our intention is not to make our readers wish they had a new pair of glasses. If we want to show individual values, we use a table. When we want to examine a development in detail, we use a normal time series chart. If we primarily want to focus on the final (i.e. current) value but also want to show this value in its historical context, we use a sparkline.
   
   “Die Welt” couldn’t make up its mind. We first see the individual values for the absolute dividends followed by the same values drawn as a miniature line chart. Afterwards, we see something really interesting – the yield in percent. We would like to view those historical values as sparklines. Unfortunately, they are missing.

2. When we draw a sparkline, we also include a reference value that quantifies the last point of the row. This way, we can compare all previous points to this value to get a general idea how the individual values stand in relation to each other. After all, that is what makes sparklines so fascinating in the first place.
   
   It took me a while to understand which values “Die Welt” was referencing in the rows. At first, I had hoped that it was the dividend yield in percent. In that case, the vertical comparison of the 30 rows would have made sense; a flat row would have symbolized a low yield. We can see the problem with how “Die Welt” visualized the chart. A high relative yield might be hidden in a rather flat line – as it is in the case of the Telekom or Post.

3. Since sparklines are so tiny, there’s not much room above, below or next to them. Sparklines are not a quiz. We want to read – not decipher – them. We want to see the pattern in the row and not guess what the individual values are. We want to understand them – not solve a riddle. Every person who has discovered and is fascinated by sparklines wants to add or improve something. Difficult.
   
   At any rate, the help grid doesn’t help at all because we don’t know what the grid intervals mean on two different occasions. And the table’s zebra stripes don’t help much either.

4. The gauges make me a little sad. There are people who think that mafia-like mechanisms are the cause of the financial crisis. Ratings that are reduced to allegedly clear signals as they had come from rating agencies are just one example of them.
   
   To the editor of “Die Welt”: What do you mean with continuity? And why is the gauge green if the road was already clear in the past? Does that mean I can just zoom along by? Or should I check if someone or something is approaching from a side street? Whoever drew this chart really overstepped his or her boundaries. We all wanted to be a bit more cautious with our investments, didn’t we?

When we ponder over the table a bit longer, the design isn’t the only thing that gets us thinking. Absolute dividends primarily interest major stockholders who hold onto their shares for a very long time and ignore gains in the stock price because they don’t want to sell them in the first place. Everyone else, however, is interested in the relative dividend yield. That, in turn, depends on which price each individual purchased his or her shares. Every other price only serves as an orientation. Since share prices fluctuate greatly in general, continuity is a criterion that has a connotation it doesn’t deserve. A normal shareholder would not view something that continuously changes as being continuous.

A headline above the table translates as: “The height as well as the continuity counts.” That’s confusing for large shareholders. I would prefer if it had said, “We don’t know how the shares will develop tomorrow either. Be careful.”

Last weekend, I visited my Aunt Lisbeth. On her walls hung two picture frames filled with photos from Eastern Prussia. Whoever had a camera back then knew really how to use one. The composition of most of the photos was simply exhilarating. Aunt Lisbeth took the frames off the wall and dusted them off so that we could study the pictures together. Her mother had carried them in her purse while she fled over a frozen lagoon from the advancing Soviet army. Paper is thin and delicate – yet it even outlasts world wars. Data, in contrast, sometimes doesn’t even survive the next software update. At any rate, I highly doubt that my grandchildren will bend down to take a closer look at my collection of digital photos 70 years from now. Paper ages with – and even outlives – us.

We congratulate Traffic – News to go: In a time when others are shutting down the presses, this monthly magazine was honored by Lead Awards as the ‘Newcomer of the Year’. We immediately booked the back cover for six months.

I never travel without a laptop or newspaper. And the last time we were making the final approach to Nuremburg, I was convinced that my time on earth was up as well. Since all electronic devices were already forbidden, I simply held my newspaper even tighter and kept on reading when, suddenly, we had a surprisingly smooth landing. I instantly had a new appreciation for what I was reading. It even saved me during the long, boring wait for the bus and during the entire bus ride as well. A newspaper never crashes but offers comfort when you think that you are going to crash yourself. Plus, it’s harmless during the take off as well. Paper instantly gives you something to hold on to – anytime and anywhere.

I don’t remember how we got on this subject, but my father recently mentioned that he only reads articles in newspapers on topics that he otherwise would never think about. Why? They are located next to the articles which he originally intended to read. That never happened so far when he Googled articles. A good newspaper is as colorful as the world we live in – and is much livelier than the Internet in the same space. Paper is inspiring.

My last digital camera held up for four weeks. The fact that I attempted to sneak up on a mating pair of seagulls had a lot to do with it. At any rate, the objective has made a strange noise since then. The camera landed – unrepaired – in a drawer. The display had annoyed me for a while anyway. You could hardly use it in the sun – and isn’t that when most motives look their best anyway? How is that with the display of an iPad? I even enjoy reading my Sunday newspaper at the beach. In addition to handling a light drizzle, newspapers are even compatible with sunglasses. Paper is always easy to read.

I recently came across a special edition of Kafka’s short story ‘Ein Hungerkünstler’ in a museum bookstore. The graphic artist Jürgen Schlotter had designed it and received several prizes for his work. The typeface used symbolizes the inner conflict of the protagonist of the story. Schlotter created the font himself by roughly carving the letters of the alphabet in linoleum. Its layout, typography and binding are a sheer pleasure for book lovers. This type of effect simply cannot be digitalized. I remember the words of my German teacher who died much too early: “Content and form equal character.” A book is more than just its content. If I just get its content, something else is missing. That’s why we made Bella’s blog into a book and not vice versa. The amount of work involved showed us that if you can only do the job electronically, you haven’t mastered it entirely. Paper is touchable.

Each morning, the CFO of a long-established Swiss bank receives a compact, A3 sized report which he then pins to the wall behind his desk. The report is filled with the latest, relevant data. On the monitor on top of his desk, all of these numbers would only fit with the help of a long scroll bar. That just goes to show how large the resolution difference is between monitors and paper. Paper has space – for numbers, data and ideas.

“Die Welt” recently used sparklines in its March 16th edition. To my knowledge, it is the first German newspaper that made an attempt to use them. Although it didn’t follow all of Bella’s guidelines, this attempt shows that sparklines will never look as nice on a computer screen. This again has to do with the difference in resolution. If the print media just recognized the advantage they have, they would have a long, bright future ahead of them. Paper definitely has future.

In other words, paper is here to stay for a while – and will remain a benchmark for everything we do on monitors.

* Die Zeit, No. 6, 2010–02–04, page 21.

On my recent trip to New Zealand, I was searching for a Bed and Breakfast in Titirangi, an Auckland suburb which many artists and writers have made their home. I pounded the streets and tried my luck at the few available options. To be exact, there were three. Two of them were booked out and the third was closed – but so attractive that I did everything in my power to track down the owners. I tried neighbors, the Internet, the phone directory and even a restaurant close by. That took time but in the end I was in luck. As the charming hosts Bev and Julian soon told me, I apparently wasn’t the only person upon whom the house exerted some type of magical force. Their B&B recently won the Enduring Architecture Award.

The Haresnape House in Titirangi near Auckland, New Zealand. – Image: Julia Gatley, Long Live the Modern: New Zealand’s New Architecture, p. 83.

The style of the B&B is what you would call Classic Modern. Bill Haresnape, who built the house in 1958, was inspired by the works of famous architects including Ray and Charles Eames, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe. I had one-and-a-half days to experience and study the house more closely. Never before had I witnessed such all-out attention to detail. Obviously, no effort or expense had been too great to achieve the desired effect. Similar to the works of the aforementioned architectural role models, the interior and exterior spaces flow into each other. The house is truly at one with the hilly backdrop of the rain forest setting. In fact, the house almost seems to hover halfway above the woods due to its light frame construction, projecting levels and large window surfaces. The architect built it with his own hands. The wood from the trees, which were cut down to build the house, were then used to create the staircases and other details. Haresnape transported the trunks on the roof of an old car to the right spots. As his wife drove, he followed behind to ensure that the load didn’t get stuck in the curves of the tight driveway.

Auckland has a maritime climate. The sun, clouds, and rain showers alternate off and on several times on a single day. The surrounding rain forest, the sky, the colors of the ocean, as well as the sound of the rain on the patio, in the trees, and on the house’s roof and skylights create a constant, lively, natural wonder which perfectly embraces every person in the house.

All windows and glassed-in areas act as pictures of the environment with the house and walls serving as the frame. The effect is simply breathtaking. The house provides a welcome shelter against the immediate effects of the rain and sun, yet allows the people inside to experience the outdoors in a way that you only can, for example, on the Mediterranean coast in the summer.

This effect is achieved through a radical architecture that breaks with all conventions that are cheap to create or simple to maintain. What may be a nightmare for housewives is simply a delight to view from every angle. A few small details create the perfect connection between the indoors and outdoors. The frames of the sliding windows, which extend to the ceiling vertically and to the ends of the walls horizontally, flush with the floors. The wooden ceilings made of indigenous beach wood partially stretch to the underside of the roof outside. The adjacent, flushed glass surface appears as a mirrored view both inside and out. Many small, vertical sky lights provide a glimpse into the canopy of the rain forest and close the environment in the vertical, visual axis. Since the higher main level is surrounding by the original trees, you get the impression that you are living among them. The large fireplace, which is open from both sides and practically stands in the middle of the room, is trimmed with the same natural stones inside the house and above the roof. Thanks to the skylights, you can observe that directly from the living room. That, too, strengthens the impression that the room hosts a powerful, archaic hearth instead of a regular domestic fireplace. The kitchen, dining and living areas are all completely open and connected – a novel idea in the 1950’s.

Interestingly, the design of the house almost works better fifty years later because our modern living conditions have increased our innate desire to be closer to nature. But how does the design of the Haresnape House inspire us to create a new concept for software-supported business management?

The Haresnape House is radical in the sense that no effort had been too great to create something non-transient. This, in turn, is backed by the non-compromising alignment to create an archaic place to live. Fully equipped with all amenities, this house combines the full comfort of the indoors with the permanent sights and sounds of the outdoors that show the spectacle of nature.

So why am I mentioning this here, you ask? If we want to create anything that isn’t transient, we need to rediscover its original purpose and then subordinate everything else – including the time and work involved – in order to fulfill that purpose. Since managers are meant to manage their companies and not read reports, we need to examine their true purpose much more thoroughly and in a completely new light. The radicalism of the Haresnape House inspired me greatly. To what extent and for what purpose, you’ll find out here…someday.

Fans of our office dog already know that Bella has just written a book based on the German version of her blog. The title translates to "“Bella consults – 75 rules for better visualization". Next Wednesday, the first copies will be delivered to our office hot off the presses.

Gerald Butterwegge, Simone Appoldt, Nicolas Bissantz and Bella check the final proofs. Pictures below: Carlos Da-Aira explains the color control process. Helmut Hofmann with Bella.

Bella’s book is based on her blog and, therefore, first originated online. The Web, however, is a medium with a very limited resolution. All amateur pictures and scanned images, every drawing and screenshot, all of our own and quoted material worked well in the Internet. In our first attempt to transform the blog into a book, our greatest fears were confirmed: On paper, everything seemed so rough, awkward and lackluster. That meant that we had a lot of work ahead of us. We had to rescan the material, search for the original sources, edit the photos and use all of the advanced print options that our own software supports to give the book the desired effect. We painfully experienced firsthand how large the gap between the print and digital world still is. The explanation is quite simple. Monitors are Pixelland with maybe 1024 x 768 pixels. Paper, however, is Panoramaland which is generally available with over 1,200 different dots per inch. On the UV press at our printer Hofmann in Langenzenn it was even 2540 dpi.

Panoramaland is fascinating. With a good dose of creativity, craftsmanship and competence, we can create an immense resolution with highly impressive quality. Of course, we truly missed the real-time and interactive functions that come naturally in Pixelland. The ink drops in Panoramaland sit in their exact position down to the last micrometer. But if you want to place them somewhere else, that means trouble. For the future, we wish that we could have both – a type of interactive Panoramaland.

In management reports and business magazines, we often encounter visual metaphors which stem from road or traffic signs. When we see these old, familiar signs in their original ‘habitats’, however, we can learn a lot from them. Here are some examples:

Robust perception: Triangles show the direction. Plus and minus signs show changes.
We recently discussed the redesign of the Wall Street Journal. For the past few weeks, the journal has applied a new coding for plus and minus signs: little red and green triangles which show how indexes and currencies have changed compared to the previous day. These triangles appear at the top corner of two different pages and either point up or down.

I recently encountered similar triangles while hiking through the forests of New Zealand. A trail, which left the main path and headed into a dense, tropical jungle, was marked by plastic triangles that hung vertically every few meters. These signs were more than just helpful. They were essential because a person could easily get lost after the first few steps in this labyrinth.

If someone had just nailed plus and minus signs on the trees, finding the right path wouldn’t be any easier. In fact, hikers might get so caught up wondering what their purpose was that they literally might not be able to see the wood for the trees.

The triangles, which were long and steep, sometimes pointed right or left and sometimes up or down. Depending on the perspective of the approaching hiker, the same symbol was cleverly displayed in many different ways so that relatively few triangles were needed to clearly mark the challenging off-road path. The color of the triangles stood out because it was not otherwise found in the forest. That, too, was a major help. Two triangles turned towards each other also signalled the stop points for counting offspring, which was the actual purpose of this trail. They showed the hikers that they had reached their destination; the path didn’t go any further.

Robust colors: Forms. Robust form: Colors.
Permanent right-of-way laws can dramatically improve the general safety before one-lane bridges, tunnels and other tight areas. The earlier the driver knows which side has the right of way, the better. The ability to differentiate colors and forms from increasingly larger distances, however, changes in various ways. In most cases, the human eye can differentiate forms for a longer time – especially when individual limitations in vision also come into play.

This sign is quickly identified from afar – even with red-green color blindness. Whoever is travelling in the same direction as the large arrow has the right of way. The differentiation between red and black makes the message even more noticeable.

When presenting information on a computer screen or printout, we need to overcome a similar situation. We can easily lose finer color nuances in two separate LCD displays, which have very low color certainty. Plus, we will oversee even larger differences in colors, at the very latest, when making black and white printouts. A robust design takes these circumstances into account.

Robust perspectives: Doubling
On a very curvy street in the mountains, a summit can hide a warning sign if it is mounted at a standardized height. One way to solve this problem is to ‘double up’, in other words, mount the same sign at different heights. The driver can see the higher sign at the ‘usual’ height before the summit and the lower one afterwards. Upon approaching it, the seemingly redundant design surely brings a smile to the faces of design-sensitive souls.

We often face similar situations with management information. The same data deserves the readers’ attention from completely different perspectives. A single visualization rarely can provide such robust perspectives. Therefore, it always pays to ask if we shouldn’t display the same data in multiple variations. What may appear redundant at first is probably the safer alternative when navigating through the twists and turns of your data landscapes.

Each of these examples was a sign to me as well. Symbols are designed to reduce insecurities and these do it adequately. We can learn a lot from their construction but we can’t apply much from their imagery without the risk of oversimplifying or even manipulating our data. How a share price changes compared to the previous day is no real guide through the modern investment jungle. And a traffic light signal cannot determine if standing still or moving forward will improve the situation.