NUMMERWUNDERKIND
Swiss designer Cybu Richli has a mission: to bring a lively, down-to-earth sensibility to scientific charts and data-graphs, those PowerPoint backwaters of anti-design. In Richli’s universe, rubber-bands twist into vertebrae; children’s balloons swell like ripening avocados; and hamburger-packaging reflects a well-balanced financial portfolio. You’ll never call data-mining dry again.
Richli contends that data-visualizations can and should be intuitive, humorous, even moving: “A really thought-through information graphic sparks an interest to read more and makes its sense clearer,” says Richli. “But unfortunately a lot of info-graphics aren’t informative or appealing. Making a great graphic requires functional thinking, but also aesthetics, independent-mindedness, even stubbornness to find that really innovative way of explaining things.”
After a stint studying architecture, Richli switched to graphic design, earning his degree in 2004 from the University of Art and Design in Lucerne. After founding his own studio, Richli turned out a dazzling array of award-winning projects from poster and book design to typography and information graphics. In his Visual Explanations project, Richli fed snapshots of everyday objects into a computer, playing with their properties and then using them as easy-to-understand metaphors for scientific phenomena. The resulting document takes the reader through some magical metaphorical leaps: how an expanding child’s balloon resembles an avocado’s growth, or how an umbrella’s spines evoke the flight of birds. “I try not to set too many limits as I experiment, taking notes about everything as I go,” notes Richli. “I get all my ideas and discoveries along the way.”
In 2005 Richli took up an invitation from Morningstar, a leader in mutual-fund data headquartered in Chicago, to re-imagine their infographics. A design believer already – Paul Rand designed their logo in 1991 - Morningstar set industry standards with its Style BoxTM , a nine-square graphic that quantifies what area of the stock market a fund invests in and makes it easy to watch for “drift” – so you always know if your value large-cap mutual fund actually invests in smaller, risky companies to boost its returns. Other Morningstar graphics include the triangular sector delta tracking which industries a fund invests in, and the standard pie-chart tracking how the fund’s assets are split between stocks, bonds, and cash. “We reduce a financial instrument into a square, a triangle and a dot,” explains Philip Burton, a designer consultant for Morningstar. “We asked Cybu to consolidate these three images into one graphic device”, so that investors can check a portfolio’s balance by several measures in a glance. The results took Morningstar’s designers through a wild thought-experiment, in which well-known shapes – foam hamburger-packaging, a ripple-less lake – incorporate all three sets of data and make imbalances in the portfolio obvious as distortions in the familiar shape. Although Morningstar stuck with its current graphics for now, Burton believes research like Richli’s “is the way a company like ours moves forward. It shook up our thinking.”
Answering questions via email, Richli works from a studio “walled-in by books” and a magic black box replete with drills, tools, photographer’s lamps, and all the crazy objects that fascinate his eye. He refuses to speculate on future projects, but admits a weakness for mixing things up even further: “Right now I’d love to design a book or poster for a museum, a CD cover for a rock band, and a new hat for Santa Claus.”
—Jude Stewart for PRINT, March / April 2007
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