Information is Beautiful
I’ve slowly made my way through David McCandless’ Information is Beautiful. Information is indeed beautiful, and so is this book. As a lifelong lover of facts, just pure and simple facts about things that I can rattle off at house parties and have people stare and wonder why I know that, those kinds of facts, well, this book is full of them. Of course, I swore that I’d never buy this book.
Maybe it was a matter of expectations or expectation management, but while I enjoyed all of the facts and pretty pictures, I came away with a rather dissatisfied feeling. I suppose I was expecting info graphics and information visualisation of a very clever and highly developed sort. What I got was a lot of clip art, possibly arranged in a visually amusing way, but not such that I came away feeling like there was some deep connection between the information and its graphical manifestation. More often than not, I got a nonce, a trick, a distraction. But ultimately I would still recommend this book. There are plenty of ideas in there, many of them good, many of them somewhat amateurish. But who knows where you will take your inspiration from?
Facts are fun! - Me
