David McCandless of Information is Beautiful has posted a work in progress pondering the nature of successful information design as the intersection of accuracy, relevance, usefulness, and structure.
He sums up the idea in a classic Venn diagram and suggests that “if you have just two elements, you get something tolerable and cool [...] but if you combine three elements without the fourth, things suddenly fail.”
Think Twice Before Firing Editors
One of the scorned staffers channeled the energy set free by the mass layoff into a vengeant act of copy editing that very literally underscores just how desperately the paper needs the editors it plans to fire. Brilliant!