Putting the politics of this issue aside -- how you think the money should be spent is another matter all together -- this article in the New York Times about the cost of the Iraq War is, at its core, a great example of the power of information design.

As the article states, it's hard for us to wrap our heads around the size of large amounts of money. For some reason, it's tough to visualize the separation between 1 billion and 1 trillion dollars. At that point, it's just a ton of money.

This is where design comes in.

While reading the text of the article, you really start to loose track of the spatial relations of it all. Numbers just bleed into numbers. There is no weight associated with each string of integers. But a simple image can put it all into perspective.

This is a perfect example of the value of information design. The ability to take to content and give it context. To take a seemingly dense block of text and reduce it to its core. Make clear, the complex.

Of course, this is harder than it may seem. Plenty of information design makes the information less clear and more dense. Take for instance this illuminating description of web 2.0, and the accompanying graphic (a 150KB PDF).

I think it's obvious why that example is so bad. It doesn't sculpt the information; it doesn't highlight the basic message. The image fails to give the information meaning or add context.

Many times we see the end result, a simple little graph or diagram, and take for granted the difficulty in getting to that point. Einstein sums up the struggle of finding that line better than I could, so I'll let him say it.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -Albert Einstein

Futher Reading