Charles Blow’s week in the barrel for the NYT
Back in February, New York Times graphics director Steve Duenes spent a week taking questions from readers at the NYT web site. We wrote about that here.
This week, it’s Charles Blow’s turn. Charles is a former graphics director of the Times who was promoted to design director and then left to become art director of National Geographic. He returned to the Times earlier this year to become the paper’s first “visual columnist.”
Charles Blow of the New York Times
—
Already, Charles has produced some interesting answers. Like this one, from reader Pam Perkins:
Q. Do you follow the field called information aesthetics? When do the charts become art?
A. I’m not familiar with this field, but I would like to make a distinction between information graphics and art in terms of their missions. Art need serve no purpose but to express the vision of the artist. On the other hand, the highest purpose of an information graphic is to clearly express the relationships among data. That said, if someone should call a chart art because of its beauty or message, that person would get no argument from me.
Find all the reader Q&As in the NYT’s Ask the Editor series here.
Here’s our earlier post about Charles’ NYT column. Find Charles’ By the Numbers blog here. Read an interview with Charles by George Rorick here.
November 1st, 2008 at 10:45 am
I really liked this at the end of Mr. Blow’s comments:
“Finally, when I hired new graphics editors, the first criteria had nothing to do with their sense of color and spacing or their ability to draw. The criterion at the top of my list was that they be smart and curious and dogged — reporters. You can teach a person which blue to use, but you can’t teach him or her to have a clue.”