▶

This New York Times article used data visualisation to show a human feeling

In March 2020, Giorgia Lupi got Covid. This wasn't unusual: the world was going into lockdown, and cases were spiking across the globe. After recovery, she experienced persistent exhaustion, pain and other strange symptoms – which, while devastating, also wasn’t exceptional. What is unusual is that Lupi, a Partner at Pentagram, began recording and visualising her experience through data, a project she later came to publish with the New York Times.

The resulting piece, “1,374 Days: My Life With Long Covid”, was published in the paper’s op-ed section in December 2023, and was produced as a collaboration between Pentagram, UX design studio Decimal and NYT Director of Animation and Graphics Jeremy Ashkenas. Comprising a central essay and accompanying visuals, the piece uses brushstrokes and pen marks to document the human toil of recording the disorder. On the website, the user experience further brings the condition to life: the scroll sometimes moves frustratingly slowly, as if you’re wading through mud, and occasionally the data overwhelms the reader, as lists of appointments, symptoms and tests crowd the screen. Toward the end, dozens of hopeful statements from fellow sufferers roll through.

It’s a profound piece, which both uses data as its basis – displaying it with poignant beauty – and plays with its limits. For this, it was awarded the Graphite Pencil in Graphic Design (Data Visualisation).

“The user experience further brings the condition to life: the scroll sometimes moves frustratingly slowly, as if you’re wading through mud, and occasionally the data overwhelms the reader, as lists of appointments, symptoms and tests crowd the screen.”

Lupi is the subject of the piece as well as the author, making her both client and designer. Projects don’t really get much more personal than this. “Sharing a personal piece – a design work about yourself – might not suit everybody,” she says, when asked about any advice she’d give to others. “But if you feel that there's something that you're either obsessed with, that you can't stop thinking about, or if there's a story about yourself that you feel that needs to be put out there because there's something missing in that space, or because it might help somebody else understand, relate, feel seen, it's worth trying to put out there. When I started to put together the piece, I said, ‘If I only help 10 people and make them feel less lonely I'll be really happy.’ And the truth is, I received probably something like 7,000 or 8,000 messages by people that went out of their way to find my email address and write to me. So far, it's probably the piece [of work] that I'm the most proud of. So, I'd encourage people that feel that urge to put it out there, to try.”

Explore Graphic Design

Prev / Next

▶

How Apple built visionOS

Apple entered spatial computing in 2023 with the launch of Apple Vision Pro. The headset itself is as good as you would expect from the tech company, but its operating system visionOS is a “feat of design”, in the words of D&AD judge Helen Fuchs, Executive Director, Design at ustwo.

visionOS is controlled with only your eyes, hands and voice. This meant that the tech company had to design an entire interface that used not a touchpad or a keyboard and mouse, but the “gaze” and “subtle gestures of the user”. Then, there was the technical challenge of designing a system that didn’t block out the real world, but was legible as a layer over it. For this, it won the Black Pencil in the Digital Design (Connected Experiences) category.

This new typology required an interdisciplinary approach. “The Apple Design Studio is a really special place,” Alan Dye, VP of Human Interface Design at Apple, says. “We bring together a wide range of expertise across nearly every design discipline. From industrial and user interface design, of course, but also through sound design, type design, graphic design, colour design, haptic design, as well as so many others. And Vision Pro brought the team together and required us to work together in entirely new ways, as well as to develop some new disciplines.”

“It's especially gratifying for us to receive the Black Pencil, because it recognises the craft and the care that went into designing so many aspects of this product.”

“It's especially gratifying for us to receive the Black Pencil, because it recognises the craft and the care that went into designing so many aspects of this product. Many of them that aren't usually celebrated as design – all those elements that can't be placed on a pedestal or hung on the wall of a museum. Rather, the gestures we’ve designed, the subtle animations and transitions,the gentle sounds, shadows and reflections, all those things that truly bring the digital world into your space. This is just the beginning of an important new chapter for computing and design.”