#davidmccandless

[garp20-jessicafairhurst]

Mega-what?

Daily MWh scale Daily MWh ,name,type,location,note,size (km2),barrels of oil equivalent,MW,capacity factor,operational hours per day,data year,source name,source date,source 1 URL,source 2 URL 1,093,Atikokan-G1,Biomass,Canada,94,215,21%,24,2014,Natural Resources Canada,

[garp20-jessicafairhurst]

Megawhat? How The World’s Energy and Electricity is Generated — Information is Beautiful

How many Hoover Dams would power all of Bitcoin? Lifting the fog on the world's energy systems.

[martinaasara]

Life is boring without a story

David McCandless is a real guru of infographics and visualization. Why do I admire this guy so much? That’s the answer: his infographic What makes a good visualization?”

A good infographic doesn’t need explanations, so I will just write here my own considerations.

I really loved the intersection between information, goal and visual form: “BORING”. Yeah, I agree: a visualization without a story is really boring.

This is really important, the intersection between information and goal: “PLOT”. I learned that it’s really essential to prepare a previous “canovaccio” before telling the story. It’s difficult, because you don’t have any idea of the path you’ll take with your story and you just know the final goal. But it helps you to not lose control along the way and to reach the most useful synthesis between message, aesthetic and readability.

So hard to get the intersection between story and goal: “PROOF OF CONCEPT”. The most difficult aim: never miss the target. Storytelling is amazing, and can be everything for the designer, but a story without a goal in “USELESS” (check the intersection between information, story and visual form).

The 4 columns of visualization remind me the 3 vitruvian architectural principles: firmitas (stability), utilitas (utility) and venustas (beauty). Visual form/Venustas and goal/Utilitas are common elements in each kind of design. You always need to say or do something in some way. And also “Firmitas” and “information” are essential. The data collection and stability are the projects’ basics. I mean: a construction is supposed to not fall down and obviously you need data clusters to build a visualization, don’t you?

...What about the story?

I believe that the story makes the difference.

Has contemporary architecture a true story?

I don’t think so. A lot of new buildings have a story but I bet that the designers have invented it after they’ve imagined the building’s design. Unfortunately I’ve seen that with my own eyes, as storyteller for Italian architectural offices for the last 3 years. In my experience I’ve always chased the design team’s work with mine. In the best case our tasks were developed in the same time, but following two parallels paths.

And how is any activity without a story?

[redclayroots]

Two Great Books, 2013

I've recently required these two fantastic books. The first is David McCandless's "Information is beautiful". It is a fascinating book that takes the reader on a visual journey through trends, facts and statistics of today's world. Not only full of revealing data, the way he has presented the information is incredibly stimulating and engages the reader with the facts being presented to them. The data is formatted in a contemporary and highly colourful way, breaking the mold of your everyday, mundane set of tables and graphs. The compositions he uses are bold and the facts seem to explode across the pages making it hard to put the book down. It is a great example of how you can express information to others in fun and beautiful ways and has given me inspiration as to how to display some of the more dry information I have to include within presentations. I can often be shy of using vivid colour within my exhibitions opting for the more safe option but now plan to experiment with different ways of displaying  text and figures in a more expressive way.

The second book is Phaidon's "The Garden Book". It acts as an encyclopedia of some of the most famous and influential gardens and landscapes throughout time. It is a really useful source when searching for a particular designer or style as gives you a brief overview of their work with a key image that captures their design approach. Flicking through this very large book their is a vast collection of different types of work and is a great starting point for research when embarking on a new project.

[paulbradshaw]

BBC Newsnight: Information Graphics (by briansuda)