Word: wurman
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...America in maps and charts? Wurman wasn't daunted. With the help of 17 other designers, the creator of the innovative Access guides has produced a 324-page graphic snapshot that amounts to a candy-colored encyclopedia. His hefty paperback runs from the efficiently informative (what steps must be taken by a would-be President; how our land is used) to the chilling (Kit Hinrichs' bull's-eye chart with a family laid over it to dramatize the chance of being a casualty of war) to the inspiring (Tom Wood's bar graph of the factors contributing to America...
...common sense than courage and more physical discomfort than danger. Professional chasers often drive 15 hours a day for days at a time, subsisting on junk food and virtually no sleep. "We eat whatever Texaco, Conoco and Citgo are willing to serve up," laughs University of Oklahoma meteorologist Joshua Wurman. Nor do the hazards of the job always come from nature. Last year Wurman stopped during a chase to help extract a car from a ditch. "While I was pushing, the driver gunned his engine and I was covered in mud and cow manure...
...scores of designers represented in the show, none has been able to feed the voracious contemporary appetite for information faster and better than Richard Saul Wurman. His paperback Access Guides -- to 13 different cities (1981-89) as well as baseball (1984) and Wall Street (1989) -- brim to overflowing with a sense of fun and curiosity about the world, intermingling maps, drawings, data and a quirky sensibility...
...best, "Graphic Design in America" is like a dense, compelling Wurman guide, suggesting half-conscious connections between then and now, Europe and America, TV and print. Within a few minutes a visitor can see an 1864 American-flag campaign broadside, collections of Coke bottles through the years (the original was designed by Alexander Samuelson in 1915), a little bag that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for a San Francisco glass-and-china shop in 1942, the sweetly all-American Ritz cracker box, the computer-animated opening credits to the 1978 Superman movie and six pages from USA Today...
...Wurman's prescriptions are sound enough: be a good listener, be a contrarian, avoid gratuitous precision, avoid cliches. He also makes some more or less fresh points: that all information is inherently selective and subjective, and that the mind is not an ultra-complicated computer but a place full of unprogrammable and meaningful lapses, quirks and non sequiturs. Yet as he approvingly predicts the proliferation of directories of directories and a new Secretary of Understanding in the Cabinet, Wurman seems to be suffering from Information Giddiness...