At CreativeMornings/London, David Mccandless shares the process behind his stunning visualizations and the role journalism has played in pursuit of beautiful, meaningful data. David believes in the use of data visualisation and infographics to explore new directions for journalism and to discover new stories in the seas of data surrounding us.
Information is Beautiful
About David Mccandless
David McCandless makes infographics — simple, elegant ways to see information that might be too complex or too big, small, abstract or scattered to otherwise be grasped. In his new book, Information Is Beautiful (in the US, it’s being called The Visual Miscellaneum), McCandless and his cadre of info designers take a spin through the world of visualized data, from hard stats on politics and climate to daffy but no less important trends in pop music. His information design work has appeared in over forty publications internationally including The Guardian, Wired and Die Zeit
McCandless’ genius is not so much in finding jazzy new ways to show data — the actual graphics aren’t the real innovation here — as in finding fresh ways to combine datasets to let them ping and prod each other. Reporting the number of drug deaths in the UK every year is interesting; but mapping that data onto the number of drug deaths reported by the UK press, broken down by drug, is utterly fascinating (more deaths by marijuana were reported than in fact occurred, by a factor of 484%). McCandless contributes a monthly big-think graphic to the Guardian‘s Data Blog, and makes viral graphics for his blog Information Is Beautiful.
via David McCandless | Information is Beautiful | CreativeMornings/LDN.
