Andrew+M+R06

Barr’s art chart and its 51 arrows is an interesting concept, but I feel the arrows are closer to noise than visual elegance. I’m glad to see a version sans arrows and if I had to choose I’d choose none. This would, of course, take away the information layer that shows the relation between two artistic movements, but would increase the readability of what’s left. If the line weight of the arrows were reduced dramatically they wouldn’t take over the composition so forcefully; even reducing their value would enhance the readability of the text, however I would imagine that printing limitations of the time prevented this from being on economical option.

I’m not sure the use of arrowhead does anything to enhance how the diagram is read. Because it follows time, it the order of influence is implied to always flow forward in time. By using time as a unit of measure or location marker, the designer implies direction and flow on how the data should be read.

Instead of arrows, Barr could have incorporated special organization and arranged each artistic movement in such a way that an influenced movement appears directly below it’s influence. This would play of the use of time as the viewer would still understand the flow in which the diagram should be read and would communicate relationship by proximity, reducing the clutter of the arrows.

I’ve been creating a family tree over the last three or four years and have more than a hundred people on it so far which has lead me to continuously rethink layout and association of each person. That data represented is important when deciding on how it will be represented. With a family tree it’s intuitive to display each person chronologically and because the concept of a family structure is universal, displaying each person directly next to immediate family members also associates them without the use of arrows or other symbolic connectors.

It’s important to take into consideration the inherent, universal or built-in assumptions that come along with the data being represented, such as the idea of time being unidirectional. In doing so the designer gets “free” organizational components that each viewer brings to the design.