JordanO_R05

There are a number of interesting suggestions made in this article from Tufte. I think some of the most interesting points come from the comparison between the old train schedule from New York to New Haven and the redesigned schedule that is on the next page. Tufte makes a lot of good points when he is talking about the old schedule and the wasted space that creates a great deal of empty paper. I am a firm believer that white space if used effectively will make you design stronger, and stand out more in the benefit of the designs context. In this case the white space is miss used and forces the rest of the information to be cramped into little columns that puts the legibility of this schedule in question. With these columns being so crowded already there is an over abundant amount of information stuck into them. There are 24 AM’s and PM’s as the author states and this is a great deal of over repeated information. I think the separation of these columns and information in them is the biggest mistake in the old version of the schedule. Related information is to far apart from each other making your eye create a lengthy visual line to find the related time. In relation to that there is another problem created when the information is pushed out to the edges of these columns. They create the visual appearance that the information on either side of the line is the information related to one another and not the information that is in the relating column. This is a visual trick and is easy fix as far as alignment goes.

When you take a look at the new version of this schedule you see a totally different style of table, and a much more effective one for that manner. You now have a clear distinction of which way you are traveling. Are you traveling from New York to New Haven or New Haven to New York? It is easy to distinguish which line you will be taking and where you are headed. The second difference that makes this much easier to read is the fact that the weekend and holidays section now has its own distinct column. The two categories have a separation now and are laid out in exactly the same way making them easy to understand and legible to the viewer. The loss of many of the rules greatly help reduce noise in this chart and keeps you moving down the information that you intend to find. The columns are now nicely space in relation to one another now. There is a clear distinction between departure and arrival and then the secondary column similar information relating to weekends and Holidays. I add that I think the typeface that they chose to use for this works great. A newspaper print typeface is a genius idea for compacted information.

There are many other great points to pull out of this article. I chose to primarily focus on one example being the train schedule. There are many great things just to be learned form dissecting this pocket schedule. I plan to keep these ideas in the back of my head and use them in future design pieces of mine. I also am now interested in finding more cool newspaper fonts such as this one. They might come in handy someday.