“You’re designers. Things will bother you that no one else will ever notice.”-Michael Beirut from a talk given at Notre Dame, October 21, 2005

Like all graphic designers who dream of a future in web user interface, I nurse a slightly obsessive fascination with economics.

(I’ll let the surreality of that sentence sink in…

…

okay).

Partially this is because I think economics explains how the world works, and partially this is because I’m convinced that information provided to people who are investing money (the Economist, Bloomberg, the FT, the parts of the Wall Street Journal that appear before and after the opinion page, etc.) represents the best, most accurate news you can get anywhere, but i digress…

Basically…when I need me some televised news, I spin past CNN on my way to Bloomberg TV so fast it would make your l’il head spin. I love Bloomberg for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Deirdre Bolton, but I certainly do not watch Bloomberg for their smoking hot onscreen graphics.

Bloomberg’s Interactive Display

Good lord, I don’t know if I have the strength…

For the record…the circular planning-an-attack-on-the-Death-Star thing mounted on the unadjusted RGB blue background is a pie chart that shows the sector breakdown of the S&P 500. And they use it All. The. Time.

Regardless of what it represents, it’s patently evident that this graphic would look out of place in a middle management Powerpoint. It’s sticks out like a small womp-rat among the generally high production value elsewhere in the Bloomberg media conglomerate. 

I’ll come back to the Star Wars reference for a moment to point out that meanwhile, CNN has apparently figured out the “Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi” holographic conversation thing. 

Like I said, I love Bloomberg. I wish they cared enough about design to realize that the content they provide deserves to be presented better.