Too Much Information about Manufacturing

At Clemson University's Spring career fair many companies handed out recruiting materials to students seeking employment.
However, one particular company gave me two pieces of information. The first was a business card. The second was the attached front and back of a flyer containing entirely too much information.
In fact, the flyer, although useful to give recruits an idea of what products this company manufactured, and an overview of the size of the facilities along with it's general location and growth, was a turn off.

Cosmopolitan: Info Overload

This map printed in Cosmo (March 2013) intends to tell which type of boy lives where based on surveys of 40,000 men in the U.S. Here we have what Katz calls "too little information" which unfortunately "takes up space and wastes energy."

There is so much information in that an entire page is used up with tons of text and a whole map of the U.S... yet, it's meaningless because there are no numbers.

Lots of Information at once

This is a picture from my boyfriend's AISC Steel Manual Reference Guide. The graph goes on for a few pages, each one is "continued". I believe the shape of the page in general made for a difficult display of information. It should've been created so that there was no need for a continuance of pages for the graph. Also, it could have benefited from a more distinct difference in lines.

CU Fitness Schedule

This is an old Fike schedule from last semester. I'd had it hung up in my room but because of the way the informaiton is organized and color coordinated it wasn't used very much. It has too much information and is organized in a way that distracts from its overall usefulness and ability to just glance at the sheet and find a place to go. It contains the same information that a small calendar or other type of flyer could contain but is not organized very well. I had to annotate it to really get any use out of the printout.

Information Overload

The example I used was an old study sheet in a management class I took here at Clemson. The page is full of information overload and if you were just staring at it then it would be very hard to read. The person looking at the study sheet has to get up close to the image so they can make out the information on it. The image has all the material that was on a test of mine and it is very overwhelming with information at first glance.

Information Overload

This is an image that I found on the back of my receipt from Bilo. Both of these advertisements display information overload. The advertisement regarding the Attorney provides too much information. There is a bulleted list of things to do "when good times go bad". While this information is all very important, you have to pick and choose about which is the most important. As the text mentions, functionality is the objective. This is inefficient because it will not keep the attention of the audience. The advertisement regarding the oil change has too many numbers.

Alaska

I found this image in the Anderson Independent. The reader is bombarded with information. This information overload can overwhelm and potentially confuse the reader. There are also many numbers that could easily confuse a reader. One must also consider the map that is placed in the ad. The map looks accurate but a reader does not know the distance. There is also the issue of substitution. Although, the map is accurate in shape the size is not. Also, the reader cannot tell the distance between locations that will be visited on this trip.

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