Audiences
Information designers may cater to very broad audiences: for example, public signs in airports are for everybody. Or they may cater to very specific ones: information products such as telephone bills may be personalized for individual customers using market segmentation and information management techniques and technologies similar to those used in direct marketing.
Information design projects often seek to create or reinforce trust in users of design products. Examples of such products are medicine packaging inserts, operational instructions for industrial machinery, and information for emergencies. If it's important for the instructions to be carried out, readers must understand, trust, and be motivated by the products. In other words, the audience needs to rely on the information conveyed. The designers must get the message across in ways that reach the audience.
This gives information designers unusual power over their audiences compared to other designers, and "with great power comes great responsibility". The increased responsibility means information designers require accountability, and this is developed through user testing of design artifacts.
The power relationship between information designers and their clients is also different from that between graphic designers and their clients. Information designers seek to serve the interests of their clients' audiences as well as those of their clients, and they often advocate for the audience over the client.
Read more about this topic: Information Design
Famous quotes containing the word audiences:
“I have often felt that I cheated my children a little. I was never so totally theirs as most mothers are. I gave to audiences what belonged to my children, got back from audiences the love my children longed to give me.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)
“Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal code of manly conduct is to give the offender a “sock” in the jaw.... My observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous people who are good at socking jaws.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)