Paperzine - News

Information graphics used to be a standard feature in magazine and newspaper design, but their use seems to be in decline - an oddly ironic fact given the ease with which vector-based programs such as Illustrator now enable them to be created. Fans of the form hoarde their old 1960s collections of Brian Haynes's work in the Sunday Times Magazine, the work of David Driver on the BBC listings magazine Radio Times during the 1970s and that of John Grimwade on Time magazine, all of which ingeniously illustrated how visual explanations could be created to deliver complex, funny, topical and provocative information on all manner of subjects in an accessible and engaging manner. It's likely that writer and journalist David McCandless - contributor to Wired and the UK Guardian newspaper and creative consultant for Orange and the BBC - is one of those fans. Information is Beautiful, his paean to the form, is an absolute joy, 250 pages of information design on a myriad of subjects: everything from a 'map of the internet', which looks like a dandelion clocks constructed of millions of tiny veins, to environmental issues like 'Rising Sea Levels - how long have we got?' and 'which fish are ok to eat?', both of which accessibly and chillingly show the parlous state of our planet, our oceans and the depletion of its fish stock.

As well as imparting a huge wealth of fascinating information and showing statistics (and their sources) in a comprehensible way, McCandless also exhibits a nice sense of humour across a wide range of subjects in jokey graphs and maps like 'X is the new Black - A map of clichés', 'Time Lines - time travel plots in TV and film', 'Types of Facial Hair - a little hair says a lot about a man', and 'Twitter Stats'.  What these and all the other graphics in the book combine to deliver is an impressive 'visual miscellaneum', as McCandless calls it, a huge series of facts, ideas, statistics and theories all displayed in such a way as to make the information meaningful to contemporary life - everything is contextualized and related to our experience and understanding of the world around us. As a sourcebook for ideas on how to present visual information it's a terrific book, but even if you've never designed a piece of information graphics (and never plan to) this book will give you hours of pleasure, and may well tempt you to have a go at this most enjoyable forms of graphic design. Sadly for McCandless and us, printing problems undermine 12 pages of the book, but it's a testimony to the appeal of Information is Beautiful that this hasn't stopped superlative reviews, and you can download errata sheets from McCandless's enjoyable website at

www.informationisbeautiful.net