Information Is Beautiful

Ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualized!

Cognitive Surplus visualizedJuly 19

I was listening to writer Clay Shirky talk about cognitive surplus – the idea of spare brainpower in the world’s collective mind just sitting there waiting, wanting, to be harnessed.

He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.

Shocking proportion. Interestingly, when I sketched the diagram, my imagination had the scale way wrong.

The Billion Dollar-o-Gram 2009July 14

The Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009. The latest version of our fabled treemap of billion dollar amounts.

All the data and more billion dollar amounts: http://bit.ly/bndollar

A little context

This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.

So here we’ve scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.

(**Sorry it’s taken me so long to update this image from the original version. I’ve revised and updated all the figures. Sourced some new numbers. And researched new ideas sugge

Great Visualizers: Always With HonorJune 28

Design duo Tyler Lang and Elsa Chaves are Always With Honor, an Portland-based design team with a specialty in beautifully simple information displays and iconography.

I first got turned on to / by their work when I spotted this awesome poster. It visualizes the many domains within design. Somewhat awesomely.

(Here’s a link to a massive hi-res version)

Simple Is Beautiful

Simple shapes, simple typography, simple colour characterises their work. I snaffled them up for a spread in Information Is Beautiful about the various creation stories across cultures – scientific and mythological.

Struck me there was something cool about trying to visualize such an unimaginably complex process with super-simple gra

Live-Vizzing The Emergency BudgetJune 22

“Live-vizzing” a graphic on the UK government’s emergency budget for The Guardian and Open Knowledge Foundation.

Four Great Infographics No. 8June 21

So much great work out there at the moment, I wanted to share it with y’all.

Sekret Firmy Magazine
Russian infography seems to be on the rise. Here are some great visuals from a publication apparently called ‘Sekret Firmy Magazine“. No idea what it’s about. But my eyes just don’t seem to care.

Update: Secret Firmy Magazine is the monthly business magazine of Kommersant, the Russian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. (Thanks to Bruce Bennett for the info)

Images from: Timur Shabaev and BogusFreak.co.uk

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Damn Tourists!
Twinned with the Touristy Map Of The World is this amazing set of visualisations from Eri