100 Diagrams That Changed the World Since the dawn of recorded history, we’ve been using visual depictions to map the Earth, order the heavens, make sense of time, dissect the human body, organize the natural world, perform music, and even concretize abstract concepts like consciousness and love. 100 Diagrams That Changed the World (public library) by investigative journalist and documentarian Scott Christianson chronicles the history of our evolving understanding of the world through humanity’s most groundbreaking sketches, illustrations, and drawings, ranging from cave paintings to The Rosetta Stone to Moses Harris’s color wheel to Tim Berners-Lee’s flowchart for a “mesh” information management system, the original blueprint for the world wide web. It appears that no great diagram is solely authored by its creator. Most of those described here were the culmination of centuries of accumulated knowledge. Most arose from collaboration (and oftentimes in competition) with others. Christianson offers a definition:
How Pop Chart Lab Made That Amazing Apple Infographic Robby Stein remembers when Kevin Systrom was just another startup guy, who’d created a photo sharing app called Instagram. They knew each other working at Google. Systrom’s idea for the thing was all around instant sharing—to capture fleeting moments, like a dog you met or going to the park. "People would comment, and then you’d have a conversation," recalls Stein. And yet a funny thing happened on Instagram’s march to 500 million users.
This site publishes high-touch, time-intensive data visualizations (and has a business that sustains it) Over 7,000 artists played in the New York City area in 2013. Only 21 of those later made it, really made it, headlining at a venue with an over 3,000-person capacity — among them, bigger names like Chance the Rapper, X Ambassadors, Sam Smith, and Sylvan Esso. I learned this sort of random but fascinating tidbit from a data visualization titled “The Unlikely Odds of Making it Big,” from the site The Pudding.
Gallery: How networks help us understand the world As designer Manuel Lima points out in his TED Talk, A visual history of human knowledge, the network has become a powerful way to visualize much of what is going on in the world around us. “Networks really embody notions of decentralization, of interconnectedness, of interdependence,” says Lima. “This way of thinking is critical for us to solve many of the complex problems we are facing nowadays, from decoding the human brain to understanding the vast universe out there.” Here, Lima shares a few of his favorite network graphics. The Strengths of Nations This image shows the connections between scientific disciplines such as astrophysics, math and biochemistry.
Data visualisation: how Alberto Cairo creates a functional art It's not enough for visualisations to string the correct numbers together, they should - in the words of William Morris - be beautiful and useful. And one of the leading experts in making data beautiful is Alberto Cairo - who teaches information graphics and visualisation at the University of Miami's School of Communication. His latest book, The Functional Art, is a comprehensive guide not only to how to do it; but how to get it right, too. And, if you're interested in data visualisation, you must not only read this but absorb each of the lessons he teaches so patiently. Infographics for the People – INFORMATION DESIGN AND DATA VISUALIZATION A comparison of primary mirrors. If a telescope has more than one mirror, the dotted lines show how large a single mirror would be (if it had the equivalent light-gathering ability). Below, some details of the three telescopes with the largest mirrors.Infographic by Cmglee (via Wikimedia).
The Lives of 10 Famous Painters, Visualized as Minimalist Infographic Biographies By Maria Popova For their latest masterpiece, my friend Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who have previously given us such gems as a timeline of the future based on famous fiction, a visualization of global brain drain, and visual histories of the Nobel Prize and the 100 geniuses of language — have teamed up with illustrator Michela Buttignol to visualize the lives of ten famous painters, using the visual metaphors of painting and the specific stylistic preferences — shapes, colors, proportions — of each artist. Each visual biography depicts key biographical moments — births, deaths, love affairs, marriages, birth of children, travel — as well as notable and curious features like handedness (mostly righties, with the exception of Klee), astrological sign, and connections.
Infographic therapy – Infographics for the People I’m a procrastinator, so this map by makes so much sense to me. (Now, why don’t I finish this post tomorrow?) Below, the angst of being creative, by Christoph Niemann. Wendy MacNaughton’s working day. Jeremy Nguyen’s imagined a set of freelancer stickers (for the New Yorker).
A Beautiful Poster Packed With a Year of Global Weather Data The Weather Radials poster is about as much meteorological data as you can cram onto a single sheet of paper. Raureif GmbH Each day of 2013 is represented by a single line. The bottom is the low temp; the top is the high. The color is dictated by the average. Blue circles represent precipitation.
Mid-century 3D data viz – Infographics for the People This set of 675 hand-cut cards shows the demand for electricity between October 1951 and April 1954. The cards are held by metal uprights on a wooden base, and were once enclosed in glass. Dimensions: 26.5 x 12 x 14 inches (67 x 31 x 36 cm). Each card plots demand in megawatts over the course of one day in 30-minute increments. 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization Wrapping your brain around data online can be challenging, especially when dealing with huge volumes of information. And trying to find related content can also be difficult, depending on what data you’re looking for. But data visualizations can make all of that much easier, allowing you to see the concepts that you’re learning about in a more interesting, and often more useful manner.
Informational wheels – Infographics for the People Classic info-design from the last century that still records a high score on the official Grimwade user-engagement scale. The Dist-O-Map (above) first appeared in the 1960s, and was still in production in 2008. This post follows on from: Cardboard interactives: Wheel of excuses/Cardboard interactives (2): 15 Stunning Examples of Data Visualization Data Visualization is a method of presenting information in a graphical form. Good data visualization should appear as if it is a work of art. This intrigues the viewer and draws them in so that they can further investigate the data and info that the graphic represents. In this post there are 15 stunning examples of Data Visualization that are true works of art. Click on the title or image for a larger view of each visualization.