Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Information is Beautiful

I'm very much a visual person, which you might initially think is strange if you knew my bread and butter job lies in Research.  When it comes to research, you could say that it is the numbers that ultimately matter and at the end of the day- it is the numbers that matter. But making the numbers easily digestible and visually compelling is what eventually brings the story home for our company's clients.  It's what I spend a lot of my workday doing.

So you could see how a numbers geek like me would gush over David McCandless and his website Information is Beautiful.  If you ask me, it's the perfect marriage of art and data.

I came upon this site sometime last year via one of my daily reads. At the time, some of the current projects the Collective were riffing on included:


How to know if you swing Left or Right:

"Left vs. Right (US)"

There was even a heat map of the world's most traveled to destinations:

"World Map of Touristyness"
An older infographic that stood out at the time eventually came to be the cover visual for the book McCandless put out called "Information is Beautiful".  It presents the meaning attributed to various colors across different world cultures.

"Colours in Culture"
They have some other projects that include a breakdown of web-based earnings for music artists today- a subject particularly close to my heart (I miss spending hours getting lost in aisles of records and CDs, don't you?) and even some trending showing peak break up times on Facebook. For real.

Taking the mundane and making it interesting- and beautiful. Fascinating.
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