Photograph by David Stephenson, from Visions of Heaven.
Photograph by Jim Ross (NASA). In order to test pressure points under different angles of attack, NASA introduced forty ports for low- and high-frequency pressure measurement in the inlet rake of the High Alpha Research Vehicle, a modified McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet used by NASA to research controlled flight. This photo shows the eight-legged, one-piece wagon-wheel design of the rake.
Victorian lithograph of a type of starfish called Asteria echinites, plate 60 of Exposition méthodique des genres de l’ordre des polypiers (Methodical exposition of polypary). This book by the French biologist Jean Vincent Félix Lamouroux was part of Charles Darwin’s library.
A wheel showing twenty-one pairs of virtues and vices, published as part of Speculum theologiae. Created in Germany at the end of the thirteenth century, Speculum theologiae is composed of multiple illustrations that are designed to help readers remember moral principles. This diagram is distinct from the rest of the illustrations in the manuscript, as it appears to be for the laity as well as clerics. A single unpaired spoke representing death is shown at the top, reminding the reader of the mortality of man.
Photograph from Cara Barer’s series Becoming a Myth, in which she experiments with “new ways to repurpose books that no longer have a reason to exist.” Barer transforms books into art by sculpting them, dyeing them, and then photographing them in their new state. As Barer explains, in the digital context of the twenty-first century, she hopes that “people will consider the ephemeral way in which we choose to obtain knowledge, and the future of books.”
Photograph taken within the STAR (Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC) detector, which was built to track the thousands of particles produced by each ion collision at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The collider re-creates the conditions of the early universe so that scientists can better understand the moments immediately after the Big Bang. The collision creates a fireball where quark-gluon plasma—matter in which quarks and gluons join to form a single entity—can momentarily be seen. This image reconstructed the particle tracks captured visually in STAR’s time projection chamber to prove the existence of quark-gluon plasma, which to that point had been theoretical.
Chart created with data visualization software Circos to display the progression and adjacency of the first ten thousand digits of pi. Each number from 0 to 9 is represented by a colored segment at the inner circle. This system is then used to color and place the digits; for example, if the digit 5 is succeeded by 9, a dot is placed on the fifth position (central-peripheral) of the fifth segment (wedge) and adopts the color of the ninth segment. By using this approach, it is possible to see the uniform distribution of the digits in pi: no one digit dominates the piece.
Diagram showing the most-searched musical artists in each Italian region from 2009 to 2014. Each ring represents a year, and each axis represents a region; each pair of circles represents the most searched artist in that region (in colors shown on bottom left legend) and the second most searched (in gray, on bottom right legend). If an artist appears multiple times over the years in a certain region, the related circles are linked to one another to highlight the recurrence.
Pellegrini’s exploration of the relatively consistent contribution of various African countries to oil production between 2008 and 2013. Each country is represented by a separate axis, with the total for Africa shown at the top. Next to each country’s name is the number of barrels produced per day in 2013. Circles along the axis indicate the barrels per day, from one hundred thousand (smallest radius) to ten million (largest radius). Each ring represents a year, from 2008 (inner ring) to 2013 (outer ring).
Diagram plotting the lifespan of more than 170 creative thinkers, with each spoke representing one person. Time is expressed on the underlying set of concentric rings, from birth at the core to ninety years in the outer ring. Artists are represented by orange, composers by purple, poets by red, scientists by green, and software developers by blue. The creation of each person’s most notable work (as chosen by Uberti) is shown by a black dot. The peak of creativity appears to occur in your thirties, particularly if you are an artist or scientist.
A chart mapping the similarities and differences of 140 natural, technological, and social phenomena whose occurrences follow a power-law ratio, part of a series of diagrams entitled Atlas of Powerlaws (2012). A power law is a type of probability function where a high percentage of effects is driven by a low percentage of variables. Examples can be found in the structure of the World Wide Web, the system of airport connections, and the metabolic networks of cells. Each phenomenon is mapped along an axis; colors indicate the percentage of effect driven by a small number of users (red indicates 90 percent, orange 80 percent, yellow 70 percent).
Chart featured as a colored frontispiece to the volume Outlines of comparative physiology touching the structure and development of the races of animals, living and extinct, by the Swiss biologist Louis Agassiz. At the core of the radial diagram are metamorphic rocks (in black), with various colored geologic periods grouped into four main eras, from inner to outer layer: Paleozoic Age, Secondary Age, Tertiary Age, and Modern Age. The various radial spokes across the chart (in white) represent various species, such as whales, marsupials, and serpents, grouped by class at the outermost ring. The spokes for different species vary in length, depending on each one’s estimated origins, with a few going as far back as the Paleozoic Age, or more than five hundred million years ago.
Map from the highly respected work on astronomy and navigation Cosmographia, written by the German cartographer and mathematician Peter Apian. Cosmographia was reprinted more than thirty times in fourteen languages. This map shows a somewhat accurate rendering of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, reflecting the growing interest in exploration at that time. Its estimates of the circumference and diameters of the globe (written in the bars that divide the chart in four quadrants) are less accurate.
Image showing how to find and position the North Star in order to navigate. When Thomas Hood updated William Bourne’s popular book on navigation, A Regiment for the Sea, he included charts of “celestial declinations,” which allowed sailors to avoid going through the laborious process of finding the locations of the stars themselves.
Pie chart displaying the statistics for an average day of the author, plotting various data such as number of emails sent, miles run, or cups of coffee consumed. Between 2005 and 2015, information designer Nicholas Felton meticulously documented his daily activity to create his Personal Annual Reports, compilations of information graphics that give an overview of each year, set out in the style of corporate reporting. The project is an exploration of how to graphically encapsulate the activities of an entire year, as well as how we can glean data from rapidly changing technology.
Illustration of the twelve directional winds, taken from a section of the early textbook M. Blundeuile: His Exercises. This book, by the English mathematician Thomas Blundeville, provided an overview of the knowledge needed for a young gentleman. English names of the winds are written around the outside of the circle; inside the circle, Greek names appear on one side of each wind line, while Latin ones are shown on the other.
Rand McNally and Company
Area and Population of Foreign Countries, Compared with the United States (1890)
1897
Chart that represents each country or empire by two juxtaposed circles, one for total population (left) and one for total area in square miles (right). When an entity comprises multiple regions (e.g., the British Empire), pie charts are used to indicate the corresponding breakdown within each individual region. All circles and pie charts are scaled depending on the total population or area.
Diagram Showing the Comparative Size of the Countries of the World: Population, Area, Religion and Races
1883
A Victorian diagram that uses different pie charts to showcase the comparative size of the countries of the world in terms of population (central pie chart), area (inner central pie chart), religion (bottom left), and race (bottom right).
Chart that was part of a statistical atlas of the United States, based on the results of the eleventh US census from 1890. The area of each circle signifies the entire church membership of that state. The various segments represent, proportionally, the strength of each denomination.
Collection of pie charts generated using a computer program Eaton wrote to analyze the changing colors of Lego sets over the past thirty-five years. Based on data from BrickLink.com and Peeron.com, Eaton’s charts reveal an obvious increase in the overall number of colors offered, beginning in 1993. While primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) constituted more than half of the spectrum in the 1970s, we now see a more diverse range, currently dominated by black and tones of gray.
One of the earliest uses of the modern pie chart, a visualization model that the Scottish engineer William Playfair is credited with inventing. Found in the Statistical Account of the United States of America, the chart shows a breakdown of the square mileage of the United States in 1805. The dominance of the Western territories (in light green), and particularly the newly acquired Louisiana Territory (1804), is quite evident in the diagram. Below the pie chart one can read: “This newly invented method is intended to show the proportions between the divisions in a striking manner.”
Chart measuring time through sins, as described in the Bible, displaying an inverse relationship between longevity and sin. Longevity decreases from Adam (the first man) to Moses at the same time that sin increases. The outer ring, read counterclockwise, moves through the major events of the Old Testament. Relevant biblical verses that reveal someone’s age are cited, and the average age for an epoch is shown underneath (colored rings).
Visualization showing all known empires, colonies, and territorial occupations from 2,334 BC to the present day. Each empire occupies a slice of the pie chart, with its known start and end dates. Each slice is assigned a transparency value of 10 percent, which allows concurrent empires to be visualized: the more empires that occupy the same period of time in history, the whiter the graph.
Andrea Codolo and Giacomo Covacich
Il futuro? 450 milioni di piccoli indiani (The future? 450 million young Indians)
2012
Created for the Italian newspaper La Lettura and using data from a 2012 UNICEF study, a diagram showing the impact of a large youth population in Asian countries. Segments show different indicators (e.g., state spending on education, life expectancy at birth, number of deaths of those under fifteen years old per year) in the outermost ring. From the center (zero), working outward, the rings show the percentage or number of the relevant indicators. The country directly underneath each indicator is that with the highest number for the statistic measured; under that is the country with the lowest. The color scale indicates each country’s level of development: yellow for industrialized countries, light green for emerging countries, and dark green for developing countries.
Rose chart showing wind direction and speed in New York City from 1960 through 2000. Data has been aggregated and distributed along axes corresponding to wind direction. Colors represent ranges of wind speed: one to four knots in red, four to seven knots in orange, seven to twelve knots in yellow, twelve to nineteen knots in green, nineteen to twenty-five knots in blue, and more than twenty-five knots in purple.
Interactive chart synthesizing twenty interconnected factors (shown along the edge of the outer ring) that contribute to the success of fisheries in developing countries. Users can select various stakeholders to see how they might prioritize factors and how their priorities overlap (or fail to overlap) with those of other stakeholders. The radius for each factor is proportional to the amount of emphasis the selected stakeholder might place on that factor. In this version, the interests of a conservationist (in green) and a fisher (in blue) are shown.
Chart resulting from a scientific study on the work and functioning of multidisciplinary teams, in which subjects evaluated thirty aspects of their team’s performance on a scale of one to five. Team averages are indicated through colored pie segments that can be compared with the Swiss average (marked by black bars).
Pioneering diagram showing the causes of mortality in British troops engaged in the Crimean War, from March 1855 to March 1856. Florence Nightingale was a celebrated English social reformer and one of the founders of modern nursing. This visualization demonstrates that most of the British soldiers who perished during the war died of sickness (indicated in blue) rather than of wounds or other causes (indicated in red or black). The right half of the diagram also shows that the death rate was higher in the first year of the war, before improvements in the treatment of soldiers reduced sickness.
A rose chart describing the total German Internet economy from 2009 to 2016, comparing the growth of various sectors. Each year’s wedge is divided into individual sectors by color: infrastructure/operating (purple), service/application (orange), aggregation/ transaction (green), paid content (pink), and consulting services (cyan).
Infographic that demonstrates the strong links between poverty in Italy and a variety of socioeconomic indicators. According to the Italian Statistical Agency, there were more than seven million people, or nearly 13 percent of the entire Italian population, living in poverty in 2008. This diagram segments the population by age, education, gender, family composition, and participation in the labor market. The inner rings indicate the percentages that meet these various criteria, radiating out from 0 percent in the center to 50 percent at the outermost edge. The colors indicate different parts of the country (red indicating the south, yellow the center, and green the north), revealing a strong concentration of poverty in the south of Italy.
Chart by the French design agency Ask Media investigating whether low-cost airline companies are cheaper than traditional companies. Prices for a trip between Paris and Rome booked at different times (a day ahead of departure, a month ahead of departure, two months ahead of departure, and three months ahead of departure) were compared among three low-cost airlines (Ryanair, easyJet, Vueling) and one traditional airline (Air France). The chart is divided into three sections, according to trip length: a weekend, one week without luggage, and one week with luggage. Differences in price among carriers are shown in the area of each wedge, colored according to airline.
Richard Garrison
Circular Color Scheme: Target, June 27–July 3, 2010, Page 1, “Pack Your Cooler With Savings”
2010
Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper, 25 × 25 inches (63.5 × 63.5 centimeters). Circular Color Schemes (2008–15) is a series of drawings derived from advertising circulars by the American artist Richard Garrison. Garrison measures the amount of space occupied by the objects on these fliers and then mathematically converts those amounts into scaled multicolored wedges within a circular grid. Finally, he paints the drawing, matching the colors of the original flier, to reveal the palette and design of American consumerism.
Overview of the Brix Sans type family, created by the German graphic designers Hannes von Döhren and Livius Dietzel. It breaks down the 696 glyphs that compose this sans serif family into multiple categories (e.g., currency symbols, numerals, arrows, and mathematical symbols). Numbers indicate how many glyphs of the font are dedicated to each function.
Chart breaking down the demographics of the Occupy Wall Street movement by categories such as gender, age, education, employment status, and salary, as well as political leanings. It is based on an analysis of 5,006 surveys collected by Harrison Schultz, who helped develop occupywallst.org, and Héctor R. Cordero-Guzman, from the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College.
