Chris Dickman (bio)

Contemporary designers think of their practice as one of solving client problems, rather than simply mechanically flogging products and services. But where words show up, do you simply jump to what typeface to use, or do you focus first on the effectiveness of the text? Of course, there's not always room for such engagement, but to what extent would helping craft the verbal message add value to your services?

The meaning and usage of words is complex, and even those who pound the keyboard for a living never really touch bottom in terms of exhausting the capabilities of language. Thankfully, useful tools exist and, as you might expect, some of the freshest thinking is to be found in their Internet incarnations. I'm here today to sing the praises of one in particular, something that I find valuable enough to be worth its annual subscription rate of $20—the aptly-named Visual Thesaurus.

At heart, this is a Java-based dictionary that you use via browser (with a desktop edition available for the unwired). Enter a word and, bing, you're presented with a network of linguistic connections—in the screen shot at left (click to enlarge) I used "design." I wanted to see just nouns (red dots) and verbs (green dots), but adjectives and adverbs can also be displayed.

Valuable enough, but it gets better when you start mousing around. I clicked on the obscure "excogitation" which displayed a new tree containing among other words "mentation," which apparently is "the process of thinking—especially thinking carefully." Sweet. (Note to whoever owns mentation.com—you're wasting it, dude!)

Design is increasingly a multinational practice, with designers called upon to take responsibility for print or Web products in several languages. The client may supply text in each language but if so, and you use it as supplied, your integrity is at stake. For example, there is a huge market for creating multilingual Web sites for European firms, since English is increasingly the global language of business. And members of the massive hospitality industry often provide sites in multiple languages to cater to an international clientele. But sloppy translations can be embarassing.

A painful example is the site of L'Alexandrin, a French restaurant that recently received its first Red Guide star. As is often the case, the owner's wife is a central presence in the dining area and I am sure she is very charming. Unfortunately, in speaking of her the English version of the site translates the French "pétulante," meaning vivacious or exuberant, as "petulant," meaning... well, according to the Visual Dictionary, such less desirable attributes as peevish, cranky and fractious.

Luckily for L'Alexandrin, a restaurant's stars aren't based on the quality of the translations on its site, which are often less than palatable. Is the French site designer responsible for such slips? Perhaps not, but imagine how more valuable its work would have been if it had ensured the accuracy of the text. Visual Thesaurus supports Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish, displaying results for these simultaneously. The screen shot at left (click to enlarge) shows French and English enabled. What's neat here is that you can click on any of the alternate language words to make them the focal point, thereby inverting the results to provide a fresh perspective.

You can perform a few free searches on the site to give Visual Thesaurus a spin, so I won't rattle off a feature list here. I think you'll find the service valuable and enjoyable enough to use that you'll have a hard time not subscribing. And it may even open a new focus on the importance of finding just the right words for whatever project in which you're engaged. It did for me.

Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com