The World Wide Web is a vast universe, proliferated with Web sites, social networks and interactive media. All of them are created with one goal in mind: to deliver information. And by “information”, I don’t mean long narratives or factual data. Whether it’s in the form of video, a Facebook profile or an interactive portfolio, anything that’s intended to communicate something—even if it’s a simple feeling—is information. In fact, because information is a very misleading term, the interactive community prefers to call it “content.” A List Apart goes even further by defining an actual strategy for Web content.

The Marriage of Substance and Style

All too often, content is offered up as pure aesthetics—or else it’s dumped on a page in a series of uniform, uninteresting paragraphs. Consequently, Web sites that engage both our emotion, and intellect are rare. It’s similar to dating. One might have curves in all the right places but not personality, while another might be smart and ugly. Either way you find yourself wanting more.

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Today it’s easy to be overloaded by information. To combat the bombardment of world news, trends, and trivial facts, a specialized field of graphic design has flowered with the promise to help marketers make your word-centric Web sites, PowerPoint presentations, pitch material and other communications more compelling and easier to absorb. The field sometimes called as “information visualization” takes on the daunting task of creating simple and clear ways of displaying complex information. For years, this has been referred to as information design. View full article