Category: Infographics

Airways

THE EVOLUTION OF THE AIRLINE ROUTE MAP.

They’re mostly found near the back of in-flight magazines, along with profiles of jets and lots of aircraft manufacturer metrics that probably only appeal to about one person per flight, maximum. (Yes, I’m that person. I want to know the wingspan of an Airbus 320.) You can find some network information in these spider-web extravaganzas, but it’s quite hard work, especially in areas where there’s lots of flights. The one above shows Delta’s US network.

Of course, this type of map grew in route complexity as commercial air travel expanded. Early maps were pictorial and rather engaging. These historical examples, with easily defined routes, are all from the 1940s. Jet-powered airliners didn’t come into service until the 1950s, with the consequent dramatic expansion of flight networks.
Below, American Airlines, 1945. Click on the image for a larger version.

A detail. “Oh look, there’s a steam shovel down there, just like on the map!”

Delta Air Lines, 1946.

Air France, 1948.

BOAC, 1949.

The historical images above can be  downloaded in high resolution from the David Rumsey Map Collection. https://www.davidrumsey.com

Talking of BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation), I saw this 747 decked out in retro (and excellent) livery at Heathrow Airport last summer. It was painted to celebrate British Airway’s 100-year anniversary.

BA’s current look.

Photographs © British Airways.

The maps gradually outgrew their format as air travel expanded. With no possibility to isolate and examine a single route, they’re of marginal effectiveness in print. Obviously the lines are not flightpaths. So an airline route map is more a diagram than a map, with the lines arcing farther in an attempt to avoid all the other lines.

Pure flight
Airline routes drawn from data, by John O’Sullivan.

By Aaron Koblin. See an animated version, with a flight count, here: https://bit.ly/31QuBWf

Interactivity
Opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of exploring route data. Here’s one example.  https://www.flightconnections.com/

And finally… interactive airport flightpaths from Infographics Group. Explore it here: https://flight-patterns.igg.solutions/

Eight by Eight Issue 16: The Greatness Factor

FEATURING THE ALL-TIME BEST PLAYERS.

The latest edition of Robert Priest and Grace Lee’s football (soccer) magazine* has just arrived on the newsstands. It contains a 27-page celebration of ten great players. Below are some sample spreads from that section, and from the rest of the issue.

Order it here: https://shop.8by8mag.com

* I’m the infographics director (see below).

Ten degrees of infographics
I’ll probably run into some trouble from the data police for arranging this graphic at an angle. OK, I accept the criticism in advance, obviously it’s easier to compare values when they’re not tilted, but…that’s showbiz! (Click on the image for a larger version.)

Making better data viz

ACKNOWLEDGING OUR MISTAKES, AND LEARNING FROM THEM.

I’m a bit late getting to this, as the book was published on October 15, but that’s not in any way an indication of my feelings about the latest excellent tome from my friend, Alberto Cairo (Knight Chair in Visual Communication at the University of Miami). In my opinion, everyone who is visualizing data needs to read it.

Here’s what Alberto told me last week about his main reason for writing the book:


I’ve been designing infographics for more than twenty years, and writing books about them since 2012. Recently, I’d been thinking about their common themes, and the driving forces behind them. I realized that I wrote them as if I were telling readers, “Here, these are the things that I’ve learned through study, practice and, more importantly, trial-and-error, so you don’t have to.”

“How Charts Lie,” in particular, contains tons of examples of erroneous or commonly misinterpreted graphics, and in the book I say that I think I’ve made most of the mistakes that I describe. So I know where they come from. This isn’t false modesty, but plain truth.

We celebrate our successes, so why not do the same with our fumbles? As a consequence, the book is a playful overview of graphical disasters, but also a celebration of the power that graphics have to illuminate complex information.

Below are a few of the many examples of data visualization that Alberto analyzes in detail:

A 2016 election map with results by county. Territorial voting results do not show us how many people voted for each candidate. This one is on it’s way to be hung on a White House wall. The photograph was taken by Fox News Foreign Correspondent, Trey Yingst. (@TreyYingst) https://bit.ly/34nfh3O

Photograph by Trey Yingst. @TreyYingst


Corellation doesn’t equal causation. Does more smoking make you live longer?


A baseline set at zero gives a clearer impression of the difference in the numbers.


 

The cone of uncertainty is a frequently-misinterpreted storm warning. This is the predicted track of the aptly-named Subtropical Storm Alberto, which crossed the Gulf of Mexico in May 2018.

Buy the book: https://amzn.to/34nSEwg

A few corrections for the first edition are here: http://www.thefunctionalart.com/2019/10/how-charts-lie-few-corrections.html

 

Zoologist

THE SCIENTIFIC ART OF ERNST HAECKEL.

“Kunstformen del Natur” (Art Forms of Nature) is Haeckel’s masterwork. Published in 1904, it contains 100 illustrations of animals and sea-life in two volumes. The illustrations were originally published in ten sets over the previous six years.
Here are some examples of the plates. Above, bivalve shells. Below, sea squirts.

Moths.

Lizards.

Sea snail shells.

Ringed worms.

Slime molds.

Hummingbirds.

Tree of Life
Haeckel was strongly influenced by Charles Darwin’s seminal book: “On the Origin of the Species.”
This diagram is from “Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen” (Anthropogeny or the Evolution of Man), 1874.

My previous post featured Taschen’s “History of Information Graphics”:
https://wp.me/p7LiLW-33l
There’s a page in the book about Haeckel’s “Radiolaria.” (Protozoa with a diameter of 0.1 to 0.2 mm. They have mineral skeletons.)
Below is one of the plates.

History lessons

TWELVE CENTURIES OF INFOGRAPHICS.

This impressive guide to historical graphics, curated by Sandra Rendgen and edited by Julius Wiedemann, was published last month. It’s big and heavy, in the Taschen tradition, and packed with around four hundred examples that track the development of information graphics from the Early Middle Ages to the end of the twentieth century. The historical progression is punctuated by separate sections that feature the collections of David Rumsey, Michael Friendly, Michael Stoll and Scott Klein. This is essential reading for people in our field.
Here are some sample spreads. Click on the images for larger versions.

Below, Beatus of Liébana, ca.1180.

Hartmann Schedel and Michael Wolgemut, 1493.

Charles-Joseph Minard, 1869. (From Michael Friendly’s collection.)

Emma Willard, 1846.

Left, Carl Weigand, ca. 1963. Right, Hermann Bollmann, 1964.

Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda, 1972.

Taschen’s website: https://bit.ly/2Z7pdiD

Transparency
I have a graphic in the twentieth-century section, but I’ve tried my best to be objective about the book. If you get a copy, you’ll see what I mean about there being a lot to learn from these pages.

35,000 years ago
The first post on this blog (in August 2016) was a very short history of infographics: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-9C

Infographics revisited

EXAMPLES FROM THE ARCHIVE.

Photograph by Julian Osley.

After 230 posts, I decided to take a break from this blog. Now the two-month recovery period has come to an end. Teams of therapists have done their work, and all is calm in Athens, Ohio.

I’ll start posting new material soon, but as prelude to that, here’s ten infographic posts from the extensive collection that’s on view at the world-famous Grimwade Museum of Informational Graphics. They’re in no particular order, and are not necessarily the most popular posts (or my personal favorites). But hopefully it’s a reasonable sample. Next week, I’ll give a second run-out to some data visualization posts.

Instructional https://wp.me/p7LiLW-SD

Size comparison https://wp.me/p7LiLW-181

Sketching infographics https://wp.me/p7LiLW-14Q 

Cutaway magic https://wp.me/p7LiLW-qF

Infographics for aliens https://wp.me/p7LiLW-lW

Science decoded https://wp.me/p7LiLW-1cu

Informational illustrations https://wp.me/p7LiLW-21G

Line art https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2is

Deconstructed https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2uX

Anatomical https://wp.me/p7LiLW-qy

Big numbers

EXPLAINING EXTREME METRICS.

The weight of life (above)
Vox adds it all up. https://bit.ly/2xsp908

Nigel Holmes has made many big number explanations. Here’s four examples.
We often see these mega-numbers used in the news. But do we really understand their magnitude?

A party for everyone in the world (from National Geographic magazine).

Doubling numbers gives surprising results.

Here’s Nigel’s take on the enormity of the U.S. national debt (in 2010).

World population
Seven billion and growing. An explanatory video from NPR. Click on the image to watch the video. Or here: https://bit.ly/1ikyI0f

Speed of light
James O’Donoghue (NASA) made these animations to give us a better idea of light speed.

World debt
$63 trillion, that’s all. And this is from 2017. Infographic by Visual Capitalist. https://bit.ly/2BWrArR

Cheese overload
A 1.39 billion-pound cheese surplus, visualized by Vox.

A related post, Charles and Ray Eames’ landmark “Powers of Ten:” https://wp.me/p7LiLW-21z

Paper anatomy

ANATOMICAL ART BY LISA NILSSON.

Lisa uses a technique known as quilling which dates back to the Renaissance. She rolls and shapes narrow strips of Japanese mulberry paper to create these cross-sections of the human body. See more here: https://bit.ly/2UVQ4si
Above, “Midsagittal Female.” Below, “Male Torso.”

“Shoulders” (detail).

“Coronal Man.”

Detail.

“Female Torso.”

“Abdomen” (detail).

“Transverse Head-Tongue” (detail).

“Head and Torso” (detail).

An earlier post: Sabeena Karnik uses the art of quilling to make letterforms. https://wp.me/p7LiLW-2Dl

Ordered

ARRANGEMENT REVISITED.

Photograph © Simon Puschmann

I’ve posted before about the simple principle of using organization to reduce chaos and to reveal information.
Here are some more examples of the art of arrangement.

Personal favorites (above)
Photographer Simon Puschmann shows the things that mean the most to him.
Simon’s portfolio: https://bit.ly/2N1KAJB

Patrol car (below)
An example from the New Zealand Response Teams’ “Flatpack Challenge.”

Crop diversity
Uli Westphal highlights the vast range of our fruits and vegetables in his “Cultivar Series.”The images draw attention to the need to protect crop diversity in the face of high-yield farming. Photographs © Uli Westphal. https://www.uliwestphal.de

Every Thing We Touch
Paula Zuccotti documented all the everyday objects that various people had touched over a period of 24 hours. https://amzn.to/2I5fJgH
Below: Cowboy, Tuscon.

Chef, Marrakesh.

Violinist, Seattle.

Cleaner, London.

Photographs © Paula Zuccotti

Two previous posts about organizing objects.

Organized: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-Z4

Arranged: https://wp.me/s7LiLW-arranged

A blog dedicated to the concept: https://bit.ly/1iUdhVX

Pictogram story

A LEGEND TOLD WITH SYMBOLS.

This experimental book is the work of Warja Honegger-Lavater, a Swiss artist and illustrator, who had a design career that included creating logos and trademarks. In 1962, MoMA published “William Tell” as an accordion-fold book. Warja went on to produce several books that feature classic fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault.

The Tell legend holds an important place in the folklore surrounding the birth of the Swiss nation. It’s told here entirely with symbols, which are explained in the key on the opening spread. The idea of communicating entirely with pictograms has been tackled by a number of people. Nigel Holmes wrote a series of excellent posts on this blog about attempts to create a language using icons. This is the first one: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-LX

Below is “William Tell” told with symbols. The icons change size based on their importance to that part of the story. (I added a translation of the key.) It‘s a fascinating and creative infographic exercise that is clearly aimed more towards adults. Although for children, the use of a symbol language softens the worrying aspects of this rather dark tale. A counterpoint to this argument: As much as I love pictograms, and the book, I’m left feeling that this ultra-graphic approach is perhaps not the most engaging way to introduce your child to the magic of storytelling.

 

The legend in words
Bailiff Gessler, who was a very nasty piece of work, put his hat on a pole in Altdorf town square, and made the people bow down before it. But William Tell walked straight past, so he was arrested. Knowing that Tell was an expert marksman, Gessler ordered him to shoot an arrow (from 120 paces away) into an apple placed on Tell’s son’s head. Failure, or refusal to do it, would mean death for both Tell and his son. Of course, we all know that Tell shot the apple straight off his son’s head without harm.
However, Tell had taken a second arrow from his quiver, and when Gessler asked him what it was for, Tell replied that if his son had been harmed, he would have used that arrow to kill Gessler. The result of this revelation was that Tell was dragged to a boat in which Gessler was traveling back to his castle at Küssnacht. The general idea was that when they arrived there, Tell would be thrown in the dungeon indefinitely.
On the trip across Lake Lucerne, a strong storm sprung up and a scared Gessler was pressured by his soldiers to release Tell so that he could steer the boat to safety. Tell maneuvered the boat to land, grabbed his bow and quill and jumped out. Then he kicked the boat back out into the lake, and escaped. Tell raced to a lane that led to Gessler’s castle, and killed him with an arrow to the heart as he passed by. The people were free of the tyrant.

Tell Monument
In the market place, Altdorf.

Photograph by Roland Zumbühl

The collector
I’m once again indebted to my friend, Professor Michael Stoll, who owns this signed copy of the book, and suggested the subject. There are several posts from Michael’s wonderful collection of historical information design on this blog. Of course, we can all learn a tremendous amount from the best work of the past.
Start with Michael’s amazing Cadillac: https://wp.me/s7LiLW-cadillac

Then try these:
Wall charts: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-1Sj
Eye model: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-1yx
Flap books: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-IV
Flight thru Instruments: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-Rr
Herbert Bayer’s Geo-Graphic Atlas: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-xO
The Atlas to Alexander von Humboldt’s “Kosmos”: http://wp.me/p7LiLW-jO