Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Book review: Turning Numbers Into Knowledge
Over the past few months, I've been gathering practical, hands-on resources for quantitative analysis. You would think this would be easy, but it's been quite challenging to find books or software that are detailed enough to be meaningful and informative, yet not so detailed as to be a) over my head or b) overkill.
As a design strategist, I don't need the kind of precision or technical detail that, say, an engineer, physicist, or econometrician would demand. I just need good tools for back-of-the-envelope analysis that will help our design team become directionally correct. Turning Numbers Into Knowledge is, so far, the closest thing I've found to such a book. While not precisely what I was expecting, it was an exceedingly good read and will most certainly have a place on my shelf for a long time to come.
From the book's website:
Turning Numbers into Knowledge teaches you (in a non-technical way) the art of using numbers for practical problem solving, revealing tools, tricks, and heretofore unwritten rules that the best real-world problem solvers know by heart. Everyone, from journalists to researchers, academics to activists, and CEOs to government officials, will glean something useful from this book. If you need to understand numbers produced by others, if you supervise people creating such analyses, or if you're generating numbers yourself, you need this book!So, what exactly is in the book? Think of it as halfway in between Super Crunchers andAnalyzing Business Data With Excel. The book is divided into 40 chapters, each about 2-7 pages long and focused on a specific topic, yet unified by the common theme of critical thinking about using quantitative information.
For example, chapter 27 is "Dig Into the Numbers," and one of my favorites. It offers general guidelines on how to clean data to ensure that it's valid, check relationships between the data to make sure it's internally consistent, and most notably, how to normalize it to make comparisons easier. It brings the guidelines home by creating a few charts that explore the relationships between US GDP, population, and steel production, as well as a model that explains the differences in the share prices of Google and GE.
However, the majority of the book is essentially just a playbook for critical thinking. The best way to sum up the book is by listing the suggestions in the closing chapter:
- Don't be intimidated by anyone
- Be a critical thinker
- Don't confuse what's countable with what really counts
- Get organized
- Question authority
- Dig into the numbers
- Focus on the essential
- Document, document, document
- Use the Internet
- Remember that others don't care about your work as much as you do
- Synthesis follows analysis
If it's not obvious by now, I highly recommend this book to just about anybody. It seems particularly valuable to people who, like me, have some intermediate knowledge of quantitative analysis, but could use tips on how to apply it. But really, it's for anybody who needs to think critically, and that set includes everybody on the face of the planet.
Official website
Amazon
Labels: books
posted by Finn McKenty at 8:31 AM
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Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Juan Faura: Hispanic Marketing Grows Up
Hispanic Marketing Grows Up - Juan Faura
I picked this one up blind off the shelves, and it turned out to be absolutely fantastic. The author is the principal of noted Latino marketing agency Cultura and a former director at Cheskin. Juan's credentials are impeccable, and the book is everything you would expect from someone with his impressive background. First of all, I love the conversational, personal, yet authoritative tone. It's a welcome departure from the stuffy, phony writing I oftentimes associate with business books. It's much more like reading a blog or interview transcript.
Second, the book is absolutely crammed with insights, despite being relatively short. It's the product of hundreds of interviews and years of experience, all distilled into easily digestible but powerful nuggets. There are about a dozen composite profiles of different Latino consumers, chapters on acculturation, media, and other topics, but what really hit home for me were the 30 "perceptions and realities" about the Latino market, in which he lists typical assumptions we make about the Latino market and his take on them.
For example, the Latino market is broadly divided into people that speak primarily English, primarily Spanish, and those who are bilingual. The conventional wisdom is that primarily Spanish-speaking people prefer to consume Spanish media, but it turns out that isn't necessarily the case for a variety of reasons- social, political, cultural, and economic. Faura lists 29 more insights like this, all concise, impactful and very readable.
What I like is that he doesn't tell us that everything we thought we knew is wrong, that all the conventions of Latino marketing are wrong. Instead, he says they're basically correct, but that marketers need to understand their nuances and details in order to effectively understand the audience. It's a nice change of pace from the blowhards and pundits that crowd the business book market, and the book is worth reading for anybody in product development.
posted by Finn McKenty at 1:44 PM
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Monday, June 11, 2007
Paul Rand: From Lascaux to Brooklyn
Paul Rand: From Lascaux to Brooklyn
Like a lot of people, my first few years as a designer were spent imitating other designers, and poorly at that. In retrospect, I think a lot of that was because of my myopic view of design- my work wasn't great because I didn't understand design in the greater context of art and visual communication. It wasn't until my sophomore art history class that my eyes were opened.
Like a lot of students, I wasn't really looking forward to taking art history because it's a lot of memorization, but after a week or so I was hooked. I became aware of architecture, and realized how much it has in common with graphic design. Sure, I'd heard the big names before, but without the professor to guide my along, I never quite made the connections. As obvious as it seems in retrospect, I never realized that Le Corbusier and Brockmann were doing the same thing in two different media, that Tschichold and Gropius were two manifestations of the same idea.
Modernist painters also threw me for a loop. Like a lot of people, I had always just disregarded abstract and non-representational art as self-indulgent hogwash. By studying it in the context of the cultural environment that spawned it, as well as in the context of the styles that came before and after, I came to understand what made it so special. I remember the exact moment when the instructor brought up a slide of "The City" by Leger... I'm pretty sure I actually let out a little squeal. That was the painting that showed me the power of of abstraction, of communicating more by saying less.
I could go on forever, but the point is that a year of art history made me grow more as a designer than anything before or since. The proof of this approach is in the pudding- my work is ten times better.
Rand's book takes the reader on the same journey that I took, looking at work from the earliest recorded visual art (the Lascaux cave paintings), to graffiti in Brooklyn. In exquisitely concise language, he draws parallels between something as simple as a painted fisherman's bouy and contemporary graphic design, often by articulating in a single sentence what people like me take years to realize.
Some examples:
"One quickly realizes that simplicity and geometry are the language of timelessness and universality."
"Modest subject matter, modest means, and modest talent do not always prevent an artifact from offering an aesthetic experience to the viewer."
"The quality of a picture is measured not by how much it adheres to nature but by how far it departs from it."
The book is a fascinating exploration of graphic design as the latest chapter in the history of visual communication. Rather than try to sum up everything Rand says in the book, which would surely fall short of capturing his brilliant insights, I'll point to its impact on my work.
I spent a lot of time doing my best to imitate people like Buck and Shilo (as I'm sure many of us have), usually with lackluster results. The reason why my imitations of their style fall flat (aside from my lack of talent) is that they arrived at that style as the sum of their experiences and influences, while I was just going through the motions, aping their specific stylistic touches without any regard for the content.
Too many people do just that: empty formalism that emulates a style without linking it to the content. "From Lascaux to Brooklyn" is an incredible book because it's nothing less than a guide for a designer to find his or her own voice. I only wish I would have discovered this book ten years ago, although it would have been over my head at the time.
The book couldn't be any more relevant in today's postmodern world. Digital tools allow us to acquire, manipulate, and layer imagery, sounds, and motion like never before. The designer today is less a craftsman, creating elements from raw clay, than a collage artist that assembles existing assets, creating new meaning by juxtaposing the meanings of those elements. Only by deeply understanding the history of all these assets - social, political, cultural, and economic context- can the postmodern designer create meaningful work.
Labels: books, graphic design
posted by Finn McKenty at 2:06 PM
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