Infographics

Yesterday afternoon, I was painting my room with my friend Tom when my new neighbor, Mike, happened by. We started chatting about majors, Mike mentioned he was a math major. I remarked how I'd actually struggled with math until I hit trigonometry and calculus, because it required more visual interpretation. It became problem solving as opposed to memorization.

Tom, a Russian and Eastern European Studies major, mentioned that while giving due credit to higher math, for most people he felt nothing was more applicable that a solid statistics course.

Statistics are everywhere now. From the way Google begins to understand its search results, to its rival Wolfram-Alpha being entirely devoted to the discourse, to marketing campaigns based of case studies, and so forth. What is particularly useful, and seems to be more common now, is a graphic language built to better express these statistics:


This piece by Gavin Potenza ran in Good Magazine this last week. Admittedly, there is nothing entirely striking about the way the design influences how we see the data, but the statistic's visibility itself is key.


Nigel Holmes designed this for a New York Times Op-Ed about progress made in the years following Hurricane Katrina.

I find my work—in design at least—being pulled more and more in this direction. Graphical information can be both poignant and revealing.