XPLANE (company)

This article is AbOUT the design company. For similarly named items, see Xplane.

XPLANE is a design company that creates illustrations for corporate clients. The company aims to distill complex processes into easy-to-grasp illustrations, using visualization techniques which it calls Pictonics. XPLANE was founded in 1993 in St. Louis, Missouri by David Gray as a visual arts company creating graphics for magazines such as Business 2.0 (in particular that magazine's "XPLANATiONS"). It soon expanded into illustrating corporate presentations, business plans, and whitepapers; training; and interactive design.

In 2000, the company was awarded the St. Louis Business Journal Best Places To Work award for People Development. At the time of the award, the company had a policy of flexible working hours and of allowing employees two weeks at full pay every year for workshops, seminars, and training. Other employee prerequisites included discussion groups during the day, night classes taught by employees to other and to prospective employees, a weekly party on the company building's roof every Friday after hours, and a massage once per month. The company's headquarters are now located in Portland, Oregon.

In 2006, XPLANE acquired ideamaps.net, a visual communications company based in Madrid, Spain.

On its website, the company hosts two web logs, the xBlog (information on design topics) and the bBlog (business applications of graphic design), and case studies that include graphical user interfaces, statistical maps, and discussions of Internet protocols and brand strategy. The weblogs are run by former employee Bill Keaggy, a digital designer who spends between 10 minutes and 2 hours per day on them, and were originally internal company resources.

Further reading

• — a discussion of Business 2.0's brand, illustrating some of the "little ant people" (as they were termed by the magazine's art director, Laura Morris), that characterized XPLANE's "XPLANATiONS", that came to be an integral part of that brand

• — a report of XPLANE's "xblog" electronic mail marketing campaign run by Bill Keaggy

• — a report of XPLANE that includes several example XPLANATiONS

• — Sikes interviews David Gray.

See also

• Visual thinking
• Rich pictures
• Information graphics