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.
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.
Historical city maps by Matthew Picton. http://matthewpicton.com
Below, Paris 1749. Layered information using Duralar film, paint and pins.
London 1666. Made from book covers of “The Plague Years” by Daniel Defoe.
Damion Hurst constructed 17 city maps using knife blades, razor blades, fish hooks and othersharp metal items for his “Black Scalpel Cityscapes” exhibition. https://bit.ly/2Ee6jvl
Below, an area of Rio de Janeiro.
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
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.”
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.
Starting in the late 1950s and carrying on for decades, space exploration was a big influence on design. This followed on from, and overlapped, the Atomic Age, which had a similar kind of golden-future impact. Above, Seattle’s Space Needle, built in 1962 for the 21st Century Exposition, which is also known as the Seattle World’s Fair. ( A post about the Atomic Age: https://wp.me/s7LiLW-atomic )
The 1964/65 New York World’s Fair sits firmly during the heyday of the style. This is an opportunity to once again show the fantastic Unisphere. It’s still there. Go and see it if you can. (Mega-globes post: https://wp.me/p7LiLW-3D)
Photograph by Anthony Conti
“The Jetsons” captured the Space Age popular aesthetic. The original series ran from September 1962 to March 1963.
The KenAnn Building in Fort Lauderdale was built in 1964. Online sources say that it was inspired by “The Jetsons.”
Image: Google Street View
NASA logo (1959).
The iconic Las Vegas sign (1959).
Photograph by Thomas Wolfe
Capitol Records Building, Los Angeles (1956). The light on the top of the spire blinks “Hollywood” in morse code.
Disney’s Tomorrowland opened in 1955. At the entrance was the World Clock.
And Disney’s 2015 film of the same name was, naturally, an ode to the Space Age.
The architectural style know as “Googie” captures the futuristic atomic/space theme, and for a few decades was widely used in the United States for coffee shops, motels and gas stations. This aesthetic later became a component of the Mid-century modern style that is so popular today. The term came from a Los Angeles coffee shop called “Googies.”
The Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills (1965) is considered to be one of the best examples of Googie architecture.
The Cinerama Dome in Hollywood opened in 1963, using a geodesic dome design developed by Buckminster Fuller.
The latest issue is going out to subscribers this week, and will be on newsstands next Tuesday. A brilliant combination of features, engineered by Robert Priest and Grace Lee. Here’s some sample spreads from the issue. Subscribe here: https://shop.8by8mag.com/collections/subscribe
Click on the graphic for a larger version.
A cautionary tale I planned this visualization using the 2014 FIFA World Cup Technical Report, but when the 2018 version came out, some of the data was not included. So I sat down and watched the highlights of all 64 games (with a notepad).
Clearly, I didn’t follow the advice that I give to students: Don’t commit to visualizations before you have the actual data (or are sure you’re getting it). It might never materialize.
Claudia Weber recorded her Munich commuting delays in 2018 by knitting them into a scarf. Two rows for each day.
(On a good day, the trip takes 40 minutes.)
Gray: Delayed less than five minutes
Pink: Delayed five to 30 minutes
Red: Delayed over 30 minutes one-way, or delayed both ways.
The red strip was a six-and-a-half week period when the tracks were being replaced. During this upheaval, the ride took just under two hours each way. Generally, train delays have become an area of concern in Germany.
Journalist Sara Weber, Claudia’s daughter, revealed the project on Twitter nine days ago. https://bit.ly/2FzrRn8
The tweets generated a lot of interest, and that led to the scarf being auctioned on eBay for Bahnhofsmission, a charity that helps people in need at rail stations. The auction ended yesterday and raised an impressive 7,550 Euros ($8,675).
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 featureclassic 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
