#scigraph

There's no shortage of design blogs featuring the newest and hottest screenprinted posters, t-shirts, wine bottles, and every kind of object and surface that graphic designers can apply form and color to. In 2012, a graphic designer who pays any kind of attention to design media will see the best work by other designers pop up in dozens of places — on blogs, in magazines, in books — to a saturation level that would not have been possible just 5 or 6 years ago.

This is a great boon to designers in terms of cheap and easy self-promotion, but for those on the receiving end, it can be something of a vacuum. Young designers (myself included, as a 2006 graduate of design school who watched the number of design blogs multiply from a small handful to hundreds in a few years) absorb hundreds of images into their eyeballs every day via blogs, and it's largely work coming from the new, cool agencies that they'd like to work for. Said young designers create work that emulates the images they see, get hired by those cool agencies, and continue the cycle for kids a few years younger than them. This process is nothing new, but the proliferation of design media has sharpened the speed and perfection of the cycle, probably to the benefit of young designers being able to produce very professional, high quality work early on, but to the detriment of new left-field ideas within design. 

SciGraph is a blog dedicated to exposing science and math-related graphics that are generally not thought of as "graphic design," images that exist in the unsexy land of scientific papers and textbooks.

In other words, the creators of these images are never going to enter them in Print's Regional Design Annual — they might laugh at the suggestion of being considered some sort of artist, because these are graphics created for purposes like plotting data, visualizing concepts and diagramming structures. These images look the way they do mainly because of the tools available to the scientists who create them. There are arbitrary decisions in every manmade image, but for the most part, these images are driven by data and observations. Stylistic choices recede into the background.

There's probably no other way to kick off this blog than with the image at the top of this post, made famous as the album cover for Joy Division's 1979 post-punk classic, "Unknown Pleasures." Even those unfamiliar with Joy Division's music have probably seen the image — a graph of successive pulses of the first pulsar ever detected, taken from the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy — in some form, and Adam Capriola recently detailed the history of this iconic image. Peter Saville, the designer of the album, went on to design-world stardom, but the creator of the actual image is unknown. We only know that it was a computer-generated illustration from the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico. One of the goals of SciGraph is to highlight the actual image creators as well as what tools they use, if and when that information is available. Hopefully this will lead designers to experiment with and use software that isn't part of the Adobe CS6 Suite.

If you have an image that you think fits the bill, please send it to [email protected].