Alright, so here’s a little quiz:

1: What the fuck is this supposed to inform anyone of?
2: What do the colors indicate?
3: Why are there pictures involved?
4: Why does the little block at the top or bottom of the line change it’s height / width? What is that supposed to convey?
5: Why does the hand in the top-left diagram appear to be in some really shitty 3D form?
5:a: Who the !@#$ was given the job of so poorly ‘shopping in the “Budget” text in this picture?
5:b: Who the !@#$ thought that Obama’s hands were lily Byorking white? He was born in Hawaii muthaluvas! They get

Apparently “They get” to cut my comment off prematurely. And now I forget what I was sayin’.

I’m sure it was good though. So just work with that.

(Yeah, I know, on reflection, the colors indicate the severity of the problem—and the height of the “box” may reflect the timeline of the measure (not at all sure about that, I’m kinda grasping), and the tails (the long lines extended from the blocks) are the time spent in negotiation. It’s very Raskin (information dense) somewhat, but it also fails at the first hurdle: there’s no point in dense information that dense people can’t comprehend.

)

{This is why I could never write in C, or Lisp. COBOL FTW!)

They could make some cuts here and have cash up the wazoo.

The reason for the squares being different sizes is just to match the text that they’re paired with, so you can see what text/picture goes with what line on the timeline. The photos are unnecessary (probably the result of some asswipe--not the designer--insisting on them, because he likes to say he has a “good eye"), and it’s a fairly weak infographic.

Ah, now that you’ve pointed it out, I see why! I think if they’d not made the boxes bigger with the picture elements, it would have worked much better (and yeah, I’d say the pictures are totally out of place and add nothing to the information—almost definitely a “management decision"). Even then, the width changes seem pointless (that may just be an optical illusion type thing though, so that maybe gets a pass.

The thing that confuses me most of all though is that we’ve all seen timelines before: we know what they look like, we know how to read them—why go out of the way to make something that should be simple and straightforward difficult to grok?

Ah well, I doubt this will be in any designers portfolio really.