I'm sort of baffled by designer Amy Unikewicz's approach to today's illustration, which lays out the key statistics on the state of Iraq that her co-authors allude to in their op-ed. I understand the symbolism of showing the numbers in an open ledger book, but graphically, it's a poor choice. To make the graphic "read" old-fashioned, Unikewicz uses a digitally roughed-up serif typeface (in a ledger book?) run obscurely across a weave of fine grid lines. This produces what information graphics guru Edward Tufte would call a low data-ink ratio, with very little compensatory gain in attractiveness. Then she anachronistically shades the data cells a la Microsoft Excel. Given that this is the op-ed page, I would have expected the authors to use the shading to editorialize, i.e. to communicate what they feel is good and bad news in the data. But it appears that all they've done is make high numbers dark and low numbers light, depressing the data-ink ratio further. That's without even counting the picture of the pencil at the bottom, which is just silly given that all the numbers are in type, not handwriting. If this piece really needed an infographic, as it arguably did, the authors should have just produced a good, clear infographic. Instead, they made a styled-up novelty and called it "Op-Art." Harrumph.
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