This book is my personal crown juwel: Infographics are abundant today, but few people know they have been around for centuries. They have always worked as a tool for understanding. And they have been used to explain every possible topic from cosmos to religion, from diseases to market prices. In this beautiful book, I have assembled an enormous collection from the past 800 years. Available from…
The ”Napoleon Map“ by the French engineer Charles-Joseph Minard is one of the most cited works of data visualization. Unfortunately, it is still highly relevant
This was a thrilling discovery tour: “Napoleon’s Russian Campaign” (1869) is one of the most famous infographics ever. The man who created it was Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), a little known French civil engineer who immersed himself into the new art of data visualisation when he was already 70 years old. He created a wonderful series of data maps, which was largely unknown to the public…
Understanding time as a linear vector feels natural today, but it's not always been like that. The “Chronographie” was a large „time map“ published in France in 1753. A new book tells us everything about it
Will Burtin (1908-1972) was a German graphic designer working in the US, whose work fuses influences from Bauhaus to Buckminster Fuller. He was also a brilliant conceptual thinker, who used visualisation to explain complex scientific issues. This book provides a detailed introduction to his work
Punch cards were used as data storage for early computers. Their graphic design is optimized for the machines that processed them – but also for the humans who were involved in the process. This created a very curious mix of styles. For the book “Print Punch” I wrote a chapter about this graphic design oddity
One of my favorite collaborations: An urban installation in the city of Breda that made the history of infographics tangible, in the truest sense of the word. Together with the Graphic Design festival Breda and Dutch illustrator Jan Hamstra
Bar charts are everywhere today. Back around 1800, they came as a complicated visual that required abstract thinking. Was it the recording of flood levels that inspired them?
Digital archives are great to have, but hard to experience. This interactive installation lets us look at the daily work of über-artist Leonardo da Vinci, via one of his famous collections of drawings
Like many authors, German novelist Theodor Fontane was a voracious reader — and he loved to annotate his books. An interactive installation provides a glimpse into what he was after