Statistics can be boring. It’s crucial that we have them in news articles to put facts behind the story but I always though reciting numbers in a paragraph is such a waste. Statistical data takes a lot of work to generate but when you just list the numbers, it’s a bore to readers who view the data more as a necessity than part of the story. The New York Times shows us again that the numbers themselves can be the story.
Update: Find how people like you have been affected by the recession.
David McCandless is a “data and visual journalist” based in London. I think he makes some very compelling visualizations. More often than not, I see information designs that dress up the information but don’t particularly make a concept any clearer or easy to understand. McCandless has really done a great job to clearly illustrate a particular point with his work. I especially like his graphic about the safety of the HPV vaccine.
When I took a course on information design last year at RISD, my professor, Krzysztof Lenk, introduced in the first class the idea of Aristotelian aesthetics. He described this notion as the ability of good design to evoke intense emotion in its audience. He said this reaction should not be caused by the design of embellishments but by good design of the information itself. Good information design both structures the information itself in a way that is easily comprehended and, perhaps more crucially, has a singular thesis. When these two principles are achieved, we can achieve a beauty in the Aristotelian sense.
I have often recalled this one moment in class and I think I have finally distilled how intricate this one bit of advice is. Intrigued by this discussion, I went to try and fully understand what Aristotle’s philosophy of design was. Unfortunately, a initial google search brought nothing up on the matter – Aristotle never did have a stance on visual design. After a little bit of research, the closest literature I could find on the matter was an essay that Aristotle wrote on literary aesthetics.