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Bringing Joy to Your Data Work with Nigel Holmes
1.3k Plays1 year ago
Nigel Holmes is a British/American graphic designer, author, and theorist, who focuses on information graphics and information design. Graduating from Royal College of Art in London in 1966, Holmes ran his own successful graphic design practice in England. From 1966 to 1977, he worked as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer for clients such as British Broadcasting Corporation, Ford Motor Company, and Island Records. His work appeared in New Scientist, Radio Times, The Observer, Daily Telegraph, and The Times. In 1977, art director Walter Bernard hired him to work in the map and chart department of Time magazine, where Holmes later became graphics director. After a sabbatical he started his own company, which has explained things to and for a wide variety of clients, including Apple, Fortune, Nike, The Smithsonian Institution, Sony, United Healthcare, US Airways, and Visa.
See links, notes, transcript and more at the PolicyViz website.
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Transcript
Season 9 Finale Announcement
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. This episode marks the final episode of season nine of the show. Yes, nine years of doing this podcast. I know everyone has a podcast now, but when I started this show nine years ago, I didn't really think I'd be doing it for this long.
Introduction to Guest: Nigel Holmes
00:00:31
Speaker
but I'm excited to have so many great guests join me on the show and this week is no different. I'm so excited to be joined by my friend Nigel Holmes. Nigel has a new great book out, Joyful Infographics, if you want a really actually joyful introduction and discussion of data visualization. I can't recommend this book highly enough. There are so many little great treats
00:00:54
Speaker
little Easter eggs in the book, which Nigel and I talk about in this conversation. I think you're just going to really love this book. I think if you are someone who's been working with data and creating visualizations, this book will help you move to the next level to think about how to engage your audience and how to bring that joy into your content.
Nigel Holmes' Creative Process
00:01:14
Speaker
So Nigel and I talk about his writing process. We talk about different aspects of the book. We talk about how he designs the books, lots of different things for us to discuss. And so I hope you'll enjoy
00:01:24
Speaker
this season finale of the Policy Viz podcast with Nigel Holmes. And here is our conversation.
Catching Up with Nigel Holmes
00:01:33
Speaker
Hey, Nigel, great to see you wearing blue as always. Hi, John. Both got our blue on today. We're all, we're good to go. We're settled in. Great to see you. It's been
00:01:44
Speaker
since before the pandemic, maybe? I mean, we've talked since then. As I recall, I think early on in the pandemic, you did one of the, I was doing like that little video series at Urban, right? So that might've been the last time we sat down and chatted, so.
00:02:00
Speaker
Yeah. Great to see you. New book out. Joyful Infographics. I've got it right here. Folks listening can't see this, but I've got the it's the yellow blue cover with I've got my yellow post-it notes on the side here. There's some great pieces in here.
00:02:15
Speaker
And I want to try to get to as much as we can. And I wanted to start just with joy, because it's about joy. As far as I know, you're a pretty joyful guy. So I want to just get a sense from you of how you approach your work through this sense of joy and how you bring that into your work and kind of maybe even what inspires you to bring that joyful approach into your work.
Joyful Approach in Data Visualization
00:02:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, the word joy actually was Alberto Cairo. He's the editor. It was his title was joyful infographics, which I loved. I mean, I just, I guess I am optimistic and happy and I love working, you know, and when I,
00:02:57
Speaker
when I get excited when somebody calls and says would you do this and I will say yes before before they've said what it is because some subjects some subjects are not so joyful and uh and that's actually something that we maybe should talk about in a little bit because I'm I mean I'm not trying to
00:03:20
Speaker
make people tell jokes with data or anything like that. It's, it's an approach more than anything. And I think it shows in the work, I think I can look at somebody's work, somebody else's work, and say, they enjoy doing this. I mean, so it's enjoy, as well as joy, I just thought of that, isn't that clever? And the, I don't know, I just,
00:03:46
Speaker
I want people to feel happy. I want them to be happy when they're doing the work. And I do understand
00:03:58
Speaker
that it's not always possible. So I'm not trying to be dogmatic here, but you can still be joyful and happy even with difficult subjects. And the way to that is to try to be friendly to the reader or the user
00:04:21
Speaker
or somebody who's looking on the web or somebody who is reading a page. I'm actually very much rooted in the static page and in static websites, by the way. But that's just because that's the way I grew up and I haven't really changed very much.
00:04:40
Speaker
I mean magazines have been in my life all my all my life from right schools on and I always tried to have a sense of humor which comes I think from a lot of English influences
00:04:58
Speaker
some of which are in the book. And some of them are just silly things like Edward Lear and Monty Python and things like that. And I understand that that's not a particularly good example to use when you're trying to tell people the truth about data. But everybody has silly thoughts.
00:05:24
Speaker
And I think the thing is to kind of train them into what part of this is silly enough that I can use it or is not so silly that I, or is too silly so I should get rid of it. And anyway, I'm rambling. So how do you think about those more serious
Humor and Serious Topics: Finding Balance
00:05:45
Speaker
topics? I mean, we could take, I don't know, relatively poverty rates as an example, right? So how do you approach
00:05:55
Speaker
A story on poverty through a joyful lens while giving it the seriousness that it deserves.
00:06:03
Speaker
Well, I think my approach is twofold. One is if I can find a way to use humor, then I will. But if it's completely inappropriate, then the second approach is I want to make it as understandable, as friendly, as approachable, as unlike homework as possible.
00:06:27
Speaker
So that things are clear, it's clarity, it's explanation, it's something that people can look at and say, oh, now I see it. And so it's a smile of recognition, more of, oh, ha ha, that's funny.
00:06:44
Speaker
It's joy and understanding rather than joy of laughter. But there's nothing wrong with laughter. And also some seemingly serious subjects like
00:07:01
Speaker
uh i don't know i i i've been fairly rude to uh politicians in the past and and and timed at when i was at time yeah and um the editors liked it but the
00:07:17
Speaker
the representatives of the politicians didn't like it at all. And I did some pretty silly drawings of George Bush and of Reagan and of Carter, actually. So you can tell how old I am here. I don't know any other president. But I mean, the thing is, they did some things that should have been brought
00:07:44
Speaker
to the reader's attention. And if it was a budget that wasn't good, or it was something that they said that was wrong, or they were out of touch, I'm going to point that out. And of course, that brought a hail stone down on me as well, or a hail of stones, or however you say it, from people who said, no, if you're an information designer, you shouldn't, you shouldn't mess about like that. Right.
00:08:11
Speaker
And my comeback was, hey, you don't know my audience. My audience, at that time, general purpose, reading a magazine, a weekly magazine that they were going to throw away. This was not going into the archive. Well, it went into my archive. But I mean, this is a comment. And I saw nothing wrong with making comments. And I still don't. I think we should tell the truth.
Data Presentation: Objectivity vs. Narrative
00:08:42
Speaker
But I'm on the fence about both sidesism. Yeah, yeah. So I wonder then, there is kind of an axis or a spectrum here of going from pure opinion to objective fact. Yeah.
00:08:59
Speaker
uh maybe that's not the right spectrum to think of but but i think a lot of people are making arguments with their data yeah and maybe a lot of people get stuck in the trap of let's try to be as objective as possible yes even though we're trying to make an argument and i think people sort of
00:09:15
Speaker
mix those two or confuse those pieces? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. They do. And I can make that clear. And in a sense, I think it's dishonest if you don't make it clear. I mean, if you just say, well, this is going to sound rude. But if you if you if you say to a reader, I trust you to understand what I'm saying in this data, and it's really bad. None of that is spoken. Right. You just give them it.
00:09:44
Speaker
A lot of people won't get that, but others will, and they'll say, wait a minute, that's also bad because you haven't pointed out the salient parts of the data. And I really think we should do that. I think there should be more kind of labels that say, wow, look at this bit. Here's a line that goes up or
00:10:10
Speaker
like this goes up and it goes up and then suddenly goes down. Wait a minute, what happened here? Why don't we say something? And kind of mess with the purity of the data by helping people to understand it. And I think that's a friendly thing to do. I think that's a joyful thing to do. And when you talk about and think about your audience, we can go back to time.
00:10:40
Speaker
when you were when you were at time. Did you or did folks there talk to readers like how did you how did you figure out that audience like that they are you know they're picking up the magazine they read it kind of quickly and then they move on to the next magazine like so so how did so I think because I think this is a problem a lot of people have which is they want to think about their audience
00:11:03
Speaker
Well, they don't know exactly who their audience is. They don't know how to get that feedback. So what was your approach early on and even today? Well, early on was easy. They wrote letters. They wrote tons of letters and they loved what I was doing so that I was able to stand up in front of, I'm going to call it Mr. Tufti because I don't know whether he is a professor anymore, but and say, hey, you know, you get the wrong idea about me.
00:11:32
Speaker
right um i know who i'm talking to and they love it now he could easily have come back if he'd bothered to and say but they shouldn't love it right you know because it's not pure yeah um and uh i don't know i don't know pure from pure from his
00:11:53
Speaker
perspective. Yes. Yes. Right. From his perspective that is built on his opinion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think I got his books, I got all his books, they're beautifully produced. They're little works of art. Yeah. And they have a lot of good stuff in it. And a lot of the things I actually agree with. And I was at a
00:12:18
Speaker
I was at a thing for the Cooper Hewitt about maps. They did an exhibition about maps. And his wife Dorothea was there, and she teaches drawing. And she was on the same panel as I was. And I got on really well with her. And I thought, at last, she's going to go home and say, hey, Eddie, what?
00:12:40
Speaker
This guy's okay. And I never heard anything. No, no, no. I do like the idea of him, of her calling him Eddie though. That brings me joy right there just to have that. So I want to talk about the production of your book in a moment, but I want to read a section here, a sentence that you wrote, because I think there are many amazing nuggets in this book. But this one is I thought about prepping for our conversation. I thought this one
00:13:09
Speaker
is useful for a lot of people. So early on in the book, you say, as long as designers don't overload infographics with so much extraneous stuff that the meaning of the story is obscured, we shouldn't be afraid to add a feeling of approachability and humanity, even humor where appropriate, to our graphic toolboxes, which is something you've already talked about here. But I want to know, how would you recommend someone who is an information designer think about that sweet spot between
00:13:37
Speaker
stuff and too much stuff. Well, first a mea culpa. I mean, academic people could have chosen much worse examples than the ones that you see all over the place that I did, where
00:13:52
Speaker
I, as I rose up through time, I became the person who was in charge of saying whether or not it should be printed, you know, and I gave myself too much liberty. And there are some really overloaded graphics that I did that I'm ashamed of, which actually are in the book, which I've got to put a big cross through. Okay, so how would I advise somebody
00:14:19
Speaker
is two things to think about. What the subject is and who the audience is. Now that sounds very, and we've talked about audience and it's difficult to know who the audience is, but if you don't know, I think you have to say I'm making it for this audience. You're doing it yourself and
00:14:42
Speaker
And have I made enough of a graphic point with, let's say the illustrations or whatever, photographs or the visual stuff that is not the data? Have I made enough of a point of that without obscuring the data? And I always say that if I get the smile or the recognition from the image that people see and
00:15:11
Speaker
and don't immediately, somebody doesn't immediately say, oh, that looks interesting. Now, what's the data? If they don't say that, then it's a failure. It's too overloaded. It's, oh, God, I can't get through this. The guy's just showing off, which I did. I trained as an illustrator. I have no knowledge of statistics or anything like that.
00:15:34
Speaker
which I think is a good thing because it keeps you ordinary. It keeps you like the readers. So think who is reading this. If it's an academic paper you're doing, you're not going to mess about at all. And I wouldn't. And I've done stuff like that. If the subject is about death or AIDS or, well,
00:16:02
Speaker
you see that ages me now straight away. But I mean, you know, or some sort of infirmity, I would never, I would never touch anything that was
00:16:15
Speaker
that got in the way of the information. I'd make it straightforward. But I would come back and say, but I wouldn't just put everything in and say, oh, I haven't got a space for an illustration here, so I'd better put every data point in.
00:16:32
Speaker
No, I would still make it clear. And if the line went up like this, gradually up, I might say I'm taking this point and this point and making a straight line because
00:16:50
Speaker
There's not enough difference in the ups and downs of the line. I'm talking about a line graph here, but it could be bar chart or anything. There's not enough difference for the audience that I've decided it is for, which is, in my case, the general reading public with who just wants to look at the information, get it, and move on, then that's it.
00:17:18
Speaker
What's the subject? How far can you go with it? And then who's actually reading
Visual Content: Engagement vs. Simplicity
00:17:24
Speaker
it? Who is going to look at this? So there's the stuff that you've mentioned that has too much in it. Yes. And then there's all the way the other side, which is take that line chart. It's just a line. And it doesn't even tell you what the graph is about. It just describes the data. It says, you know, worldwide deaths, 1950 to 2025. And that's it. Right.
00:17:47
Speaker
So in the middle somewhere, there is some thing that helps draw people into that graphic. And so how do you think about, maybe it's not depth, maybe it's not, you know, super serious topic, but, you know, it's how do you sort of balance the, I want to add something here that engages people. I don't want to make it look cartoony. I don't want to make it look foot party, but I want to do something. Well.
00:18:14
Speaker
One thing is to say, is this actually worth the chart? Maybe I can make my point with a well-crafted phrase here. And this was wonderful at time that I could go back to the writers there and I could do two things with them. I could say, you know what?
00:18:36
Speaker
The wretched old art department here, the art director, has said he wants a chart on this page. I don't think it's worth it, which thrills the writer, of course, because they've got more space. But what would you say? What would you say about this particular set of numbers? And on the other hand, I hate it when it's all words about numbers and you really wish there was a chart there. That's an aside.
00:19:03
Speaker
But the other thing that I found with writers was that I'd say to them, well, so what's this actually like? What is happening here? Is this the tail wagging the dog or whatever? And if they said yes, I'd say, well, can we have a tail wagging a dog here or is that over the top? And then there'd be a discussion about it.
00:19:28
Speaker
But the main thing I want to say actually is it's not always worth having a chart. And also, by the way, there's nothing wrong with a very small chart sometimes. I mean, some things don't have to be very big, especially the example that I gave of this point straight to this point, forget all the middle bit.
00:19:50
Speaker
you know 2000 here 2022 23 here straight line that's how much it went up yeah and that's all you need and that's all you need yeah and
00:20:02
Speaker
Or maybe it is a big number that says it's X percent growth. And it's. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I was last week, I was at the Tableau conference and I think numbers, big numbers are a big theme in dashboarding. And so I was just going to ask, like, how do you.
00:20:22
Speaker
how do you feel about just using those big numbers and do you or have you I guess played around with the with how those big numbers look so 2.3 percent you could put that in you know a Times New Roman black font and they can just kind of sit there or
00:20:39
Speaker
It could be more of what I would call like the Nigel Holmes approach, which is more of like an illustration with maybe, you know, a top hat on the three or something like that. Yeah. So, so how, when you design those, just those big numbers of those really small charts, do you sometimes try to make them a little bit more fun, a little bit more joyful?
00:20:57
Speaker
uh no often i don't um i will i will just say for the reader and for the pacing of whatever it's appearing in that sometimes you can just have something that is really rather simple uh clear
00:21:13
Speaker
but simple and then the next page you get something that's bigger and more developed and I mean that comes from my magazine training in England before I came here where the pacing of the pages was such that there weren't rules exactly but you know you didn't
00:21:37
Speaker
blast every page with a big bleed of a thing, you paste it so that some pages were largely text or some pages had just a little thing in them. And that little thing could be a chart. That concept of pacing is really interesting. Do you think the pacing in that hard copy magazine versus reading something online that the pacing is inherently different? Yes.
00:22:05
Speaker
Yes, it is. And I'm not sure that I've mastered the pacing of websites. I work with my son on websites on my own. And he has very, very different opinions. Well, no, he doesn't have very different opinions. But he says, why don't we try this? Because you can do this.
00:22:29
Speaker
That's a big, wait a minute, and has led to, I think, a lot of problems in information graphics and data visualization, is that new programs, not that new now,
00:22:46
Speaker
which will produce you something at the touch of a button almost when you just load the data in and you say wow oh okay well yeah that that looks good but you haven't done that yes that is a bug for me is is
00:23:05
Speaker
It enables more people to do it. It's the same with PowerPoint. For goodness sake, what's going to happen with AI? Are we out of a job here? I think it's actually quite scary. I do.
00:23:24
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. We're going to get off into a tangent and not be able to come back. I know. And the AI will shut us down.
00:23:36
Speaker
So the other thing I want to talk about was, and you've already, I think folks listening to this can already get this sense, but the way you approach your work is very much from an empathetic perspective. So you approach your work, not just with empathy for the topic you're working on, but also very clearly for the audience. And one of the things that many folks talk about is being able to,
00:24:04
Speaker
help people see themselves in the data. And so if you take that empathetic approach, how do you think about that when you are creating graphics and you're saying, I want people to see themselves because it's going to be helpful and they're going to embrace it more, but you're doing so in a way that's respectful and that they'll embrace very amorphous
Empathy in Graphic Design
00:24:22
Speaker
question here. But like, how do you approach that whole concept of empathy throughout the whole work process?
00:24:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's something that I started to learn at time was, and before that, actually at the radio times in England, where I worked for 10 years before going to time, the difficulty is putting people into graphics. And my natural default, to begin with, was
00:24:49
Speaker
white man doing something, postal costs, white postman running up a thing, holding a letter. And the longer I was there, the more my friendly readers started to say, wait a minute, there are other people. And I would say,
00:25:13
Speaker
stupidly. Now I realize at the time, well, this is just a graphic. This is just showing that a human is involved.
00:25:23
Speaker
And of course, that's a wrong approach. I mean, it became difficult when I would use the Otto Neurath approach of little figures lined up. And if they were black, people began to say, just as I was leaving time, which is early 90s,
00:25:45
Speaker
Are these black people? And I would say no. I mean, it's representations of people. Right. And it's actually very difficult. I mean, a kind of silly answer is never to use black people or white people, just use blue people because they're all made with blue people. And of course I like blue.
00:26:07
Speaker
So people would say, oh, well, he's using blue people because he likes blue people. And then is it a man or a woman? And I've been in discussions about the signs that you put on toilets.
00:26:22
Speaker
some men wear a thing that looks like a skirt. And in Scotland, they do all the time. And some women wear pants. So is it right to show that? Is that old fashioned or what is that? I mean, I think about this a lot in terms of symbols. And so in order to be able to see yourself in it,
00:26:50
Speaker
I don't think I've actually found the right way to do it. I mean, I go to the gym in the morning, I walk on the treadmill and I watch CNN or something like that. And there are lots of ads. This is at six o'clock in the morning.
00:27:09
Speaker
every ad has a black person, a Hispanic person, a woman and a man. Whatever it is about, whether it is about shopping or jewelry or cleaning or gardening, and they are trying to bend over backwards to be inclusive. And I don't think that is inclusive. In a funny way, every person
00:27:37
Speaker
in that gym, watching those shows is happens actually to be a white person. Now, is that an argument that they need to be educated? It's a huge, this is a huge question. Yeah, very, very difficult. Because how do you represent the entire experience and intersectionality of human beings?
00:28:02
Speaker
Right. So again, comes down to those two things. It comes down to the subject matter and the audience, who you think your audience is. And I don't know. I mean, I'm literally at a loss for words here, right? I do not know how to... No, I agree with you. And, you know,
00:28:26
Speaker
We can talk about certain categories of race. Yes. And the categories of race that we tend to talk about tend to be very limited anyways. Yes. Gender. We tend to talk about man and woman, but we know that that's limiting. Yes. So how do you.
00:28:43
Speaker
in an information visualization world, where we are trying to, in many ways, summarize experiences and summarize data. How do we represent that diversity? Which is, which, I mean, yeah, it's, yeah, I don't think there's an answer. It's something clearly that folks are thinking about, you've been thinking about. So if you were to go back now to time for those early graphics,
00:29:12
Speaker
Yes. So I'm going to give you this scenario because I'm going to limit the scenario because otherwise we'll never stop talking about this. So we're going to give you the option to go back and review all of your graphics. Yes. You're not going to be able to fundamentally change the graphic itself, the representation of the people. Would you?
00:29:36
Speaker
move away from the icon of a person altogether. Would you, you mentioned that you sort of early on were just using white men. Would you sort of mix different genders and skin colors? What would, what do you think your approach would be in that scenario? I would try to find a way around it so that I could show a person that was representative
00:30:03
Speaker
of the subject. So, let's think. I remember doing a thing about the army, the different divisions of the army, and I drew a person for each thing, and there were women in it, but I don't think there were any black people. I think it's a terrific question. Yeah, I don't think there's a
00:30:32
Speaker
I don't know if there's an answer to it. Yeah, I certainly wouldn't abandon the idea of getting people interested by not using any imagery. Right. Okay. That is one answer is just to just go to abstract shapes. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. And, and I
00:30:55
Speaker
fear that some data visualization is just that, actually. And it's not that they're avoiding using imagery, it's just they don't think it's appropriate or won't help. But it is a bit of a cop-out.
00:31:13
Speaker
I mean, you know, I like pictures. People like pictures. People like pictures, right. And if the goal is to help people see themselves in the data, I don't know if people see themselves as a triangle or as a circle, right? Right. Right. Maybe as a circle, you know. Depends on what you had for lunch. Right.
00:31:37
Speaker
Yeah. Which bit of money is this? Okay, so those are big topics. Let's pull back.
Book Design and Easter Eggs
00:31:43
Speaker
Okay. And I love that we're talking about it. But the other thing I wanted to talk about was the construction of the book, the physical construction of the book. Because like Jen Christensen book, who was on a few weeks ago to the show, she designed her own book.
00:31:59
Speaker
this book you designed, it feels, just the feel of the book is very different. And I'm gonna give folks a little bit of a, I mean, it's only an Easter egg if you don't have the book, but there is starting on page, I mean, this is just, this is like one of my favorite parts. On page, I think it's 99, I'm flipping in here. On page 99, you have this discussion about Olympic icons. Right. At the very bottom of the page, there's this little blue,
00:32:28
Speaker
figure that looks like it's running. And then you say, you write in like smaller texts at the bottom in blue, you say, I think I'll go for a run myself. Mustn't forget to exercise. And then if you flip the pages quickly for the next like 70 pages, there's a little running Nigel Holmes. Although I don't think there are glasses on the figure. And then the very end, the very end, where is it? At the very end, like 80 pages later,
00:32:55
Speaker
the figure is lying on the ground and you write okay that's enough so that's that's a little easter egg for folks who don't have the book those those 80 pages those a little little figurines so yeah
00:33:06
Speaker
Let's start at the beginning because a lot of books in this particular publish, as I know, you could have just sent your Word document over and said, go ahead, lay it out and let me take a look. And then they would publish it. But you took a different path. So what was that decision like and how did that all work out? Well, I've written quite a number of books and some of them were designed
00:33:32
Speaker
by the publisher, the early ones, with collaboration, of course. And then there was a couple that I did for Lonely Planet and one for Taschen, which were completely designed by myself. And they were more like big magazines, in a way. They were just one spread and then another spread and nothing linked on more than that. So this one, I thought, I'll actually just write the book and send it to them. They offered.
00:34:02
Speaker
to design it. So I started to write that and then they came back and they said well we've got the text we like it but we need to know where the pictures are actually going to go that you're talking about and just stick them into the Word document and first of all I had trouble actually importing things into Word and getting them and I just thought wait a minute this is not going to work at all because I
00:34:30
Speaker
I'm now going to have to write a complete kind of how to design it book with this has got to be bigger than this one. This one links to this one. This is a series of three little ones, even though I'm sending them JPEGs that are all, you know, this. And so Alberto actually said, you know, the way I do it is to write and design all at the same time.
00:34:54
Speaker
So I was ahead of him because I'd written a lot of it, but I thought, okay, how do you do that? It's InDesign. And I had no idea how to use InDesign. I told the publisher who was expecting the book in about a month.
00:35:12
Speaker
when I told him this, Elliot, at CRC Press. And I said, so I'm going to teach myself InDesign, but I need a longer to do this. And he didn't seem to bat an eyelid. He just said, oh, sure, take longer.
00:35:27
Speaker
You know, well, I mean, you're, you're doing all the work that they were going to have to do. Yes. Right. So exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. It crossed my mind that I should have asked for more money, money to begin with. As you know, John, there is absolutely no money in no money. Unless you're Alberto, I think I actually does make money.
00:35:49
Speaker
But anyway, so I started with InDesign and I realized I loved it. And it did all sorts of things. No, it didn't. I made it do things. This is key. It's key. I used none of the templates they gave me. I said, this is what I want it to do and struggled a bit. But there are one or two things that I would change and there are some
00:36:17
Speaker
little kind of style things that I should have ironed out a bit more. But by and large, that enabled me to make the book much more friendly because I could put the pictures where I wanted them. They could be the size. I could refer to them. If they happen to be on the next page, I could say turn the page or something like that.
00:36:38
Speaker
But I think, as you had mentioned to me earlier, they're a textbook publisher. They wanted figures, numbers. And I hated that idea. Right at the beginning, I had said, you know, I know you're a textbook publisher, but I'm not going to write you a textbook. So do you still want me to do it? And they said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think which was just Alberto pushing them to say, yes, it's worth doing.
00:37:08
Speaker
but I didn't want that. And so in the end...
00:37:13
Speaker
Yeah, every page. And so I was able to put that little running person in, which I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to before, and control. And actually, there's a chapter in the middle with a blank page. And I, not a blank page, a blue page. He's not on the blue page, I see. But anyway, and so, and I did the cover and, but they were very good, you know, they were, they were,
00:37:42
Speaker
the terrific people to work with once the rules were set. Right. But I would guess that a lot of people listening to this are surprised that you didn't know InDesign. Oh, I don't know anything. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to confess everything, John, here in front of your public. No, I am a computer illiterate. I am. I could not work without it.
00:38:12
Speaker
Right, right, right. And I could not be an independent person without it. It's my type setter, it's my career, all of which I needed before. Right. But you do the illustrations outside, like analog world.
00:38:27
Speaker
Well, no. I use Freehand. I use a program called Freehand for the illustrations. But no, I start analog, absolutely. Yes, yes, drawing. Drawing is very important, sketching and drawing, and then scanning that, and then bringing it into this old program called Freehand, which anybody who is under, I don't know how, what age, or over what age, or no under what age,
00:38:56
Speaker
not even have heard of. It was bought by Adobe in, I don't know, 20 years ago, I think 20 years ago. And they killed it because it's a better program. Right. And it's much more intuitive. And I just stuck with it. And I have to use a completely different computer because it won't run on Mac and anything that's 10 or up or whatever. Yeah, I think I'm 12 now.
00:39:23
Speaker
And so I have a completely different setup over there. And I have a chair on wheels and I go like this and I work over here. And then I come back with my little zip drive. Right. You plug that in. I plug that in and there it is for me to put into the book. Yeah. So
00:39:42
Speaker
But by the way, I find that very useful. The fact that you can do something really quickly isn't necessarily good. I like being able to take my time over here and then physically, literally physically put it on a different piece of medium of
00:40:00
Speaker
thumb drive, stick it into this computer, and that little kind of breathing space makes me see the thing new again. And if I was able just to very quickly, if I was using Illustrator, which I of course could do on this system, I think I would miss things. I think I would, I like the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You lose the pause. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
00:40:26
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. Well, it's a great book. I, you know, a lot of the date of his books that come my way, I kind of scan or, you know, maybe don't even read. And this one I sat down and read cover to cover. There's one in here about how aspirin works. There's one in here about why I remember this one from years ago. You presented the one on why you love cheese. I saw you present that one. So there's just an amazing amount of detail in here and I hope folks would get it. It's a great book. Really enjoyed it. So Nigel, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
00:40:55
Speaker
Well, thank you. Thank you. I enjoyed talking to you again. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Okay. All right. Bye.
00:41:05
Speaker
And thanks everyone for tuning into this week's episode of the show and the entire season of the PolicyViz podcast. We've had a lot of great guests on the show, talked about a lot of fantastic work going on around the world in data, data visualization, presentation skills, AI, and just so much more. I'm gonna take a couple months off from publishing episodes of the show, so I hope that will give you a chance to catch up.
00:41:31
Speaker
And I hope you also take some time over the summer to rest and relax and recharge. So until next time, which will be September, until next time, this has been the policy of his podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
Podcast Contributions and Listener Support
00:41:45
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the Policy Vis podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-Ramirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:42:06
Speaker
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