Analog Dreams

Tangible desires and devices for digital workflows.

Welcome to Chartography: insights and delights from the world of data storytelling.

Today: Proud moments inside sundries and then an essay exploring the integration and benefits of analog tools and practices in modern digital life. Let’s go!

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Sundries

🔎 I just learned about Facts in Focus and love both of its covers: 1972 dark-mode and 1974 glow-up.

❄️ Cartographer Kenneth Field delighted me with #8 of his ten-print run of “Californian Snowflakes.” An absolute class-act, Field included the proper hangars in the package.

His map illustrates California’s record 2022–2023 snowfall season with symbols derived from macrophotography of snow crystals. The largest crystals, representing over 100 inches of accumulation, shimmer with spot gloss. See Field’s essay describing the project at ESRI.

📖 Mark Monmonier, author of How to Lie with Maps and Distinguished Professor of Geography, reviewed our Emma Willard volume from Visionary Press. Reading such thoughtful appreciation from a legend like Monmonier means the world to me. Who else could interrogate the book’s historic and cartographic angles while also noting the book’s production design?:

its sturdy Fedrigoni Arena pages (white paper with a rough finish), large trim size (19.9 × 27.9 cm), and pleasingly patterned dark rose endpapers strike a note of elegance and durability. . . . a joy to hold and peruse.

Read his review in NACIS’s Cartographic Perspectives. And consider taking a moment today to let someone know how much you appreciate what they make. Quality feedback is precious.

🎙️Jon Schwabish hosted a chat between Visionaries editors Susan Schulten and Georges Hattab. It is such a treat to hear these three experts wax with rich connections across our three books, across time, and across all manners of information design. Listen to the podcast episode on PolicyViz.

And learn more about our books at:

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Audio note. The following essay was written while listening to a playlist featuring the “dazzling sound of Japanese City Pop from the ‘80s.” Try giving it a listen while you read! Spotify

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Analog Dreams

Yearnings and gadgets to enrich life among digital worlds.

Steve Jobs famously referred to the computer as “a bicycle for our minds.” His analogy gets imbued with more techno-future optimism than perhaps intended.

What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.—Steve Jobs

Jobs referenced the bicycle as an exemplar of efficient production. However, a bicycle is more than cheap conversion of calories to locomotion. A bicycle is a romantic object. A bicycle is freedom: The child’s freedom to venture forth. The courier’s freedom to dodge city traffic. The physical sensation of freedom as you move about the world at the perfect speed to take it all in.

Apple’s marketing has long-channeled similar romantic notions by positioning its products as tools that will aid your human flourishing. Sadly, our digital tools have precipitated a range of unintended societal consequences. The upcoming Apple headset looks snazzy. I’d love to sample it. But it doesn’t strike me as a bicycle for the mind.

I’ve been lucky to dodge most digital pits and enjoy my own personal bicycle-romance with the computer. My sustained enjoyment of digital realms owes in part to a deliberate integration of analog gadgets into my flow. I have an L-shaped workspace with two desks: one digital desk (monitors, laptops, video chat stuff) and one analog desk.

Each of my analog tools—such as a pencil—have carved out a place in my workflow due to their superior performance over their digital counterparts. But their individual success belies their biggest contribution. Each of these tools is a chance to break away from the screen, do something tactile, and think about things in a fresh way.

Following is a short catalog of my favorites that have seen daily and weekly use for several years.

A pencil is a near instantaneous superhighway from your brain to the external world. In a few strokes, an idea can go from a figment of your imagination to something real that you can point to. It is as useful as a documentation aid as it is an active thinking tool: you see what you just drew and that sparks new ideas.

I’ve made bonds with a few stalwart companions over the years. I remember favoring yellow Ticonderoga #2 pencils as a child. My first pen was allowed as a special privilege when I was eleven years old—erasable blue ink. I got through five years of engineering school without losing the same black mechanical pencil. An indigo blue Prismacolor marker illustrated (and later signed) my first book, Info We Trust.

Now, I spend all day hand-sharpening my Blackwing 602 pencil. Employed by several notable pre-Internet creatives, it was revered for enabling one to write with "half the pressure, twice the speed." At $2.50 each, it’s a cheap luxury good.

My pencil writes on a $10 spiral-bound Strathmore Sketch book. At 5.5 × 8.5 inches (14 × 22 mm), it travels easy and is the perfect size for holding during meetings. Spiral-bound helps it lay flat. I used to buy fancier notebooks, and found that I got too precious with them and didn’t fill them up as fast as I should have.

A sheen of professionalism comes to my sketches via a red self-inking date stamp. Sure, it helps me navigate old notes on the rare occasion I need to go backwards. But I use it every day because it’s fun to stamp a big red date at the top of every morning.

Books surround, penetrate, and consume my life. As a child, I walked to our village’s one-room library and get help requesting books from all over the county. Today, I’m lucky to enjoy San Francisco’s fantastic library system. I walk to one of two nearby branches every Wednesday to pickup my requests.

Back home, an extra-large wood drafting easel keeps multiple volumes at eye level. (See it above in the photo of the Snowflakes print) When I read longform text, it is usually cradled in an airplane neck pillow and held open by a leather weighted bookmark.

I often resort to a couple of electronic gadgets. For basic calculations, my hand instinctively gravitates towards a scientific calculator. When two numbers must be multiplied, there’s something about jamming those buttons that makes it much more appealing than any iPhone app. I’m also having fun with a foldable photo studio box with built-in LED light to photograph books.

Luxuriously, I recently sprang for a new analog toy: a 1953 ROYAL Quiet De Luxe typewriter. It has sensitivity touch control, magic margins, two-colors, and visible tabulator stops.

I have enjoyed nerding out about typewriter design and practicing getting good at controlling the machine. They say the typewriter moves at the tempo of human thought, no faster. Combine that with its sensory clickety-clackety rhythm and it is easy to see why they are beloved tools of many writers.

But, I did not purchase and invest weeks into getting good at it to write a great novel. I bought it to make a new flavor of data visualization, very much in concert with my digital workflows. More about that project, soon.

In our quest for technological prowess, do not forget the simplest tools that have served us well for generations. It's in the integration of the analog with the digital that we uncover the full breadth of human capacity and creativity. So, here's to marrying the bite of a sharpened pencil, the rhythmic clatter of a typewriter, and the connectivity of a computer, as we cycle onwards into an increasingly digital, and hopefully humanistic future.

Onward!—RJ

About

Data storyteller RJ Andrews helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s recently published series, Information Graphic Visionaries, a new book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators. With new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public. His first book is Info We Trust, How to Inspire the World with Data.