Brad Paley : Interaction Designer

W Bradford Paley’s Contributions

W. Bradford Paley is an interaction designer and artist whose focus in both worlds is readable, clear, and engaging expression of complex data. His visual representations are inspired by the calm, richly layered information in natural scenes. His process invokes three perspectives: rendering methods used by fine artists and graphic artists are informed by their possible underpinnings in human perception, then applied to creating narrowly-scoped, almost idiosyncratic representations whose visual semantics are driven by the real-world metaphors of the experts who know the domains best.

Brad did his first computer graphics in 1973, founded Digital Image Design Incorporated (didi.com) in 1982, and started doing financial & statistical data visualization in 1986. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art; he created TextArc.org; he is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; has received multiple grants and awards for both art and design, and his designs are at work every day in the hands of brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, and is director of Information Esthetics: a fledgling interdisciplinary group exploring the creation and interpretation of data representations that are both readable and esthetically satisfying.