I’ve had the pleasure of watching a few really great design-related videos lately.

First up: Noah Iliinsky (@noahi) presents on information visualization at the SameAs event in London.

Information visualization (a.k.a. “infoviz,” if you swing that way) is a big topic in web and application design lately, for reasons that have to do with lots of data being available to crunch from industries like healthcare and finance.

The idea seems to be that if you filter and present data in innovative ways, it will improve understanding and help to create products that point to things that users can do to improve their lives (health, savings, whatever).

It isn’t adequately clear to me that this is going to revolutionize the UX industry–simple graphs and charts have been in use for years, and overly complex and novel ways of representing data can confuse users within the context of an in-app workflow, in my experience–but it’s an interesting topic to explore, especially when it becomes clear that it’s easy to completely misrepresent the meaning of data, either accidentally or deliberately. See especially the example from Apple cited in the video.

Next: Mike Monteiro (@mike_FTW), design director and co-founder of Mule Design Studio, presents “F*ck You. Pay Me,” a profane, entertaining, and very useful examination of the business of doing design.

He covers things like contracts, working with lawyers, selling design as a business service rather than as a fun thing that designers would totally do for free, and various other things that designers (and other people who sell services) are uncomfortable talking about.

This was presented at an event called Creative Mornings that happens in San Francisco, Zurich, Los Angeles, and New York. Why not Boston? I do not know. We could really use it.

Finally, I streamed “Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight” on Netflix last weekend. It was inspiring primarily because Milton Glaser is an artist who chooses to work as a commercial designer, who doesn’t allow the mystique of design-as-art to interfere with getting the damn work done. His work is beautiful and supports the aims of his clients. And that is what good design work is.

His essays are worth reading. Here’s the trailer for the film.