A race car needs tires that grip. It needs brakes too. The machine is fast because it remains answerable to the road.

Without the right resistance, performance becomes panic.

“Message Me When You Get There”

Some friction is good, in race cars and elsewhere. I began thinking about this back in 2011.

Smartphones were passing from novelties to must-haves when I started grad school at MIT. We would often cross the river for beers in Beacon Hill. On my way to Charles Street, I might receive a little request by text: “Message me when you get there.” They didn’t want to head out until they knew someone else was waiting for them.

Smartphone culture was changing how we socialized. Gone were the days of dependable planning. Here was the new: live, dynamic, and information-rich. The new reality seemed practical, even considerate. But it changed the bargain. Committing was out. Waiting until uncertainty cleared was in.

A plan is an agreement to become countable. Three people say they will meet at nine o’clock: I will be there, you will be there, and we can act on that expectation. Part of the package is a promise not to flake out when something better appears at the last minute.

In economic terms, a plan is like a forward contract, real enough that someone can put on a jacket and start across the bridge.

Smartphone culture turned the marketplace into a field of free options. One person still had to make the market by doing the thing. Others could wait, weigh the price, and decide whether to exercise.

My experience was that in-person happenings degraded: it became especially harder to pursue elaborate things because no one wanted to be pinned down.

Not All Friction Is Waste

Some friction is stupid, cruel, exclusionary, and designed to protect whoever already has power. Bad friction humiliates, blocks access, obscures choices, and turns ordinary life into an endurance test. Bad frictions deserve to die.

Good friction is different. It is the resistance that creates contact. Brakes make speed answerable to the road. A time and place make a friend answerable to a plan. Adding a reference makes a claim answerable to a record. A printed chart makes a judgment answerable to a readership’s scrutiny. Good friction glues us together.

Looking back, it feels like the past generation’s project has been reducing commerce and culture into a panel of easy buttons. Digital design’s obsession is finding resistance and removing it. This attitude was promoted early by books like Don’t Make Me Think (Krug, 2000) and The Laws of Simplicity (Maeda, 2006). It materalized in slippery Apple systems.

These movements may have been exactly right about bad friction, but they had little consideration for good friction.

H.D.F. Kitto’s description of Greek excellence (ἀρετή) offers a richer standard. Odysseus can fight, scheme, speak, build and sail a boat, plow a straight furrow, throw a discus, slaughter and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. This is not efficiency in one department. It is competence across life. Convenience culture is brilliant at narrow efficiency: faster routes, funnier clips, and smoother answers. Good friction asks what the whole life requires.

Resistance is not one thing. The same interface that glides you down a path makes it harder to question why you are inside that groove to begin with. Some friction blocks life. Some friction keeps us connected. The hard work is knowing which is which.

Books Stay Put

In 1937, Modern Age Books published The United States: A Graphic History, a compact economic history of the country told through text and pictorial statistics. Louis M. Hacker wrote the text. George R. Taylor handled the statistical research. Rudolf Modley made the charts. Hacker and Modley reportedly worked through hundreds of chart plans before settling on the seventy-six that appeared in the book. Selection was argument.

The book is not quaint. It is a Depression-era attempt to answer a problem that has not gone away: how can a public see the shape of its own condition? It pulls few punches, opening with a pictorial map of George Washington’s slave plantation that counts its human toil and toll in an Isotype style.

A Graphic History moves through colonial trade, railroads, immigration, bank failures, unemployment, relief cases, productive capacity, and the place of the United States in the world. It does not hand the reader one perfect diagram of America. It makes the reader travel through a rich set of opinionated lenses.

That sequence is one of its useful frictions. You cannot tune the book to flatter a particular question. On your way to a chart about the vote on the Constitution you’ll bump into cotton, corporate ownership, child labor, and the worker’s day. The book makes plenty of individual claims, but it’s chasing something bigger too.

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The authors themselves admit that their book is not objective in the false, bloodless sense of the word. It has a philosophical attitude. Good. The admission makes the artifact more available for argument, not less. Its obsessions can be named. Its omissions can be criticized. Its sources occupy pages at the back. Its makers can be blamed.

The reader has somewhere to put disagreement.

That is the value of a public information artifact. Not perfect truth. Perfect truth is not available, and it would not be enough. The value is that the object remains. Many people can inspect the same chart, point to the same title, argue over the same category, return to the same page, and remember the same flawed attempt. The flaw is part of what makes the object public.

A book remains. It may be biased, incomplete, overconfident, or just plain old. But if it is published with structure, evidence, and visible judgment, it gives the public a place to stand and discuss.

The Answering Machine

That smartphone culture shift was an early step in a broader conversion: public artifacts refitted as private services. Plans became live coordination. Maps became directions. Front pages became algorithmic feeds. Publications became AI answers.

🗺️ A map and a route are not the same thing. The map gives context: how things relate, the neighborhood you are skirting, the waterfront views you are missing to save five minutes on your drive. My phone’s directions are better at getting me there, but that’s only one thing a map can do.

📰 A newspaper front page becomes an algorithmic feed. The front page was never perfect. People could object to the buried story, the insulting headline, the absence that revealed the editor’s agenda. In a feed, there are no mastheads to accuse.

📚 Reading old dead-tree media is inconvenient. But the inconvenience gave claims an address, a place. Today, if you encounter any of the knowledge from a book, it’s likely via a quick response from an AI oracle. Our great body of published work has been turned into an answering machine.

As an author, the public incentive to write a book is dwindling. Why bother making a durable artifact when readers want extracted answers?

A route may be more correct than a map for getting me somewhere. A feed may be more tuned to my interests than a newspaper. An AI answer may be more directly responsive than a book.

In that narrow sense, the service may be “truer” to the immediate question. But the older artifact may be better for us all because it preserves context, encounter, memory, and dispute.

This is one reason the phrase “tragedy of the commons” belongs nearby, though not as a headline. The damage is not always dramatic. A commons can become less reliable, less visible, less worth the first risk. When private retreat becomes common sense, the commons thin.

People can still converge on the same scandal, meme, trial, war, election, finale, or outrage. But the convergence is often shorter, sharper, and less attached to a stable experience. We get bursts of common attention without much common ground.

Smartphones, then algorithms, and now AIs. Each step made something feel more alive, dynamic, and information-rich. Each step also changed what counted as participation.

People Used To Have To Endure More Of Each Other

The old ways were not better because people were better. People were flaky, vain, evasive, selfish, status-conscious, and lazy before smartphones, feeds, and answer engines. Older arrangements simply placed more cost on some of those tendencies. They allowed fewer ways to be worse.

The smartphone made it easier to indulge without feeling like a bad person. Reachability became a substitute for reliability. Live information became a substitute for commitment. Everyone could remain available, and fewer people had to be dependable.

This is the comic wisdom of Fran Lebowitz’s “Pretend It’s a City.” The joke is that a city makes the fantasy of private optimization ridiculous. You are not alone. You are on the sidewalk, in the subway, at the bar, in this place with everyone else.

“Pretend it’s a city” means act like other people are real.

A little inconvenience sometimes did civic work by accident. When changing plans was difficult, more people kept plans. Reading the front page made you encounter things you weren’t seeking. Shared bottlenecks made private preference pass through public surfaces before becoming action.

That is what makes convenience so hard to judge. It’s hard to fault anyone for taking reasonable advantage of a new service. But enough reasonable evasions can make the shared surface less worth joining, which gives everyone still more reason to hold back.

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On-Demand

Nobody wants to hear a long retelling of your exchange with an LLM. It may have been useful and interesting to you. But socially it resembles the dream you had last night: vivid to the person who experienced it, empty to everyone else. The listener did not share the question, the false starts, the pressure, or the little turns that made the answer feel earned.

The contrast with the 1937 book is sharp. The United States: A Graphic History is limited in every obvious way: old data, old assumptions, old pictorial conventions, old story. But it has one civic advantage. It stays put. Its charts can be pointed at. Its sequence can be argued with. Its sources can be checked. Its choices can be blamed on real creators. Its flaws have handles.

An AI output may be cleaner, faster, more responsive, and more useful than a published artifact. It may even produce a better single chart. But a field of private artifacts is not the same as a public body of work. A better chart for me can still make a poorer memory for us if it arrives without sequence, recurrence, provenance, or shared address.

Not every chart should carry public weight. Tukey’s exploratory data analysis belongs here. Many charts are quick, private instruments for seeing what might be there. They are sketches, probes, working surfaces. They do not pretend to be monuments. The trouble begins when an on-demand chart has the polish of publication without the obligations of publication.

A person can become answer-rich and foundation-poor without ever being obviously misled. The surface gets smoother and the core is hollowed out. I taught a group of undergrads recently at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. While looking at some Soviet propaganda charts, I probed for what was going on in Russia at the end of the first world war. None of them had a lick of familiarity with the Russian Revolution. It was as if I was the first one to ever mention it.

When every answer can be summoned with your fingertips, you end up holding very little.

If two people discuss a printed chart, they can point to the same mark. If they disagree about a book, they can return to the same page. If they disagree about a newspaper, they can reference the same headline. But two people enthusing “my AI said” have no shared object between them. They argue from private outputs that cannot be compared in any meaningful way.

AI answers and AI charts can be useful. That’s the wrong distinction. When we need common knowledge, shared judgment, or public memory, a smooth response is not enough. We need sturdy artifacts.

We Are Doing X

While navigating flaky smartphone culture we found an effective hack. The trick was not to persuade everyone at once. The trick was to find one friend willing to commit to a thing, and to be happy if only the two of us went. Then we made the commitment public: “We are doing X. Here are the details.” That did more than announce a plan. It made a small surface. Other people could trust it, join it, decline it, or arrange themselves around it. It worked then, and it’s worked for me many times since.

Make things that others can join. Make the plan. Publish the record. Draw the chart. Name the source. Cite the page. Set the table. Convene the class, trip, club, walk, dinner, or project. Be happy when people critique. Good, they’re engaged. The answer to private convenience is to make common things.

Good friction is the grip that helps a common thing become real: the tire on the road, the awkwardness of arriving first, the time it takes to read the chart, the discipline of publishing the record, the courage of naming the plan before everyone has agreed to come. These frictions are not waste. They are the contact points by which the world is shared.

Onward!—RJ

This essay was inspired by a delicious lunch with Dan Roam.

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

The new Zheng He scroll map is ten meters long, so a classroom was out of the question.

To show it to third graders at a local San Francisco school, we had to take over the gym. Before we talked about fleets, the Ming court, or the Qingdao cartographers who designed this map, the first lesson was spatial:

Make room.

This was not a cute logistical inconvenience. It was the point.

The map was not an image. It was an event. It had to be carried, unboxed, unrolled, leaned over, and read in pieces. Students could not stand in one place and command the whole thing. No one can. A ten-meter scroll kills the fantasy that a map is best understood as a single view.

It makes viewers perform a voyage.

This essay is a sequel to an essay about another spectacular Chinese scroll map, Echoes of the Rice Fields. That one taught us that a map is not a JPG. It was lush paper, rich ink, wooden rollers, a brocade backing, and a bridge to the Guangxi Zhuang designers who made it. It reminded me that production matters. Your canvas matters. Packaging matters. In-person matters.

The Zheng He scroll taught me something more demanding: A voyage is not a view.

Four Voyages

My story started in an American gym, but the map’s story started in Nanjing. Actually, this map carries four voyages at once.

The first is Zheng He’s voyage. Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng He commanded seven major maritime expeditions for the Ming dynasty. His fleets moved through Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and East Africa. These voyages were diplomatic, imperial, commercial, technical, and spectacular—navigational achievements of the highest order.

The second voyage is the lost scroll. The historic chart behind this new map is usually called the Mao Kun Map, 茅坤图. It is also known as Zheng He’s Navigation Map, 郑和航海图. The map is believed to derive from fifteenth-century navigational materials associated with the voyages. The National Library of Singapore describes it as a scroll in the manner of traditional Chinese painting. Some place its origin around 1430. That original scroll no longer survives.

The third is the printed chart. In 1628, the map appeared in Wubei Zhi, a vast late-Ming military treatise. For that publication, the long scroll was recast into forty pages. This is the form in which the historic chart survived: not as one continuous voyage, but as a sequence of book pages.

The fourth voyage is Qingdao’s new scroll. In 2025, Qingdao Surveying and Mapping Institute published Newly Compiled Chart of Zheng He’s Voyages, 郑和航海新图. It is nearly ten meters long, or in American terms: a thirty-foot voyage. It does not merely reproduce the old chart. It reactivates it, returning route knowledge to a continuous scroll while translating it to contemporary color, craft, and public spectacle.

The new scroll is not just a map of Zheng He’s voyages. It is also a story about how maps survive.

Pages Interrupt

The most important design fact is easy to miss: the old chart was not born as a page. It survived as one. That preservation came at a cost.

A book page interrupts the voyage. A screen thumbnail collapses it. A scroll lets it unfold.

The new Qingdao scroll does not borrow the scroll format as antique costume. It restores the map’s native grammar. Route knowledge wants duration. It wants the eye to move. It wants the reader to encounter place in sequence.

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The map is an embodied experience. To read a voyage you have to move.

The Chinese characters also flow. They do not sit politely like modern labels waiting to be decoded from a stable north-up field. They follow routes, hug coastlines, bend into passages, and shift with the changing logic of the journey. This is one reason the Qingdao scroll becomes so thrilling at close range. Its characters travel too.

The Mao Kun chart compresses latitude, longitude, and repeated voyage-time into a long strip, from Nanjing to Malindi in present-day Kenya.

That is a tremendous geographic span to force into a strip map.

So the map appears to cheat, if we judge it by modern geometric expectations. Scale changes. Orientation shifts. Some regions stretch. Others hurry past.

But these are not failures. They are decisions. The chart does not ask What does the world look like from nowhere? It asks, How do we get from here to there? It reminds me of old family trees, which give regular spacing to events—not time. The scroll priortizes regular spacing to places—not latitude and longitude.

Qingdao

Four centuries after Wubei Zhi turned a scroll into pages, Qingdao turned the pages back into a scroll.

More precisely, the scroll comes from the Qingdao Surveying and Mapping Institute, 青岛市勘察测绘研究院, a professional surveying and mapping institution tied to national and ministry map-culture platforms. They promote their work with a philosophical attitude: 地图主义, rendered in English as MAP.ISM.

MAP.ISM is best read less as a brand than as a declaration: maps still have more lives to live, to give. Map + culture + technology. Its origins trace to 2006, when Qingdao began crossing maps with culture. The institution later became central to national map-culture platforms, festivals, alliances, and a broad catalog of experimental map objects.

Seen one by one, Qingdao’s projects can look exuberant: ancient maps reinterpreted, paper-cut maps, blue-and-white porcelain map objects, textile and gift maps, city identity maps, and public education projects. Qingdao is not asking whether maps are useful. It is asking what else maps can carry.

Qingdao’s mapmakers belong to the sober world of official measurement, emergency surveying, geographic information, and public territory education. Yet here they are making fantastic artifacts. This is not cartography abandoning utility. It is utility invoking the radiant side of clarity.

The Thirty-Foot Scroll

Readers always want to know how a map like this arrives in my life.

The short answer is: through design diplomacy.

The long answer begins with the scroll’s exhibition at the International Cartographic Conference, finds the Qingdao team via my friend Wendy Shijia Wang, and gets exciting with an online exchange ceremony called “Cultural Exchange Through Maps and Books.” Qingdao Surveying and Mapping Institute brought their scroll map. I brought Visionary Press books. Wang Wei, 王玮, Director of the Map Culture and Creativity Center, and Liu Xiangming, 刘祥明, Deputy Director, joined with other Qingdao cartographers and designers. Zhang Jingli, 张晶莉, helped coordinate the exchange.

At ten meters, beauty becomes logistics.

The new scroll is continuous paper mounted on cloth brocade, with wooden rollers on either end. It arrived in a wooden presentation box. This matters. Production is not secondary to the design. It is part of the design. The rollers, brocade, box, and long paper change the way people behave.

Before I brought the scroll to the school gym, I unrolled it for a few designer friends at my studio. The effect was immediate. Everyone leaned in.

It preserves original geographic markers and navigational information while enriching traditional fine-line drawing with vibrant colors and dynamic expressions characteristic of contemporary Chinese digital animation.

People get excited by its scale, then they get excited by its colors.

The old chart survives in black ink. Qingdao’s version surges with turquoise water, golden land, and magenta features, creating a visual energy that feels closer to contemporary video games than historical facsimile. This is not a reproduction. It is a reactivation.

The map is spectacular, but spectacle has a job. It attracts readers. It makes children want to lean over it. It gives adults permission to be delighted before they become scholarly.

Back in the Gym

The students had advantages many adult audiences would not: They could read the map.

A route map wants to go somewhere. The students gathered along its length, looked for labels, followed forms, compared what they saw with what they had learned.

They had already studied Zheng He. They could speak and read Chinese, so the scroll was not only a spectacular teal-and-gold object. It was legible. They could follow characters, places, routes, and visual cues that would be invisible to many adult American map lovers.

These nine-year-olds were serious map readers. The scroll gave them a map to move through knowledge they already knew.

Physical maps gather readers. They make looking social. They reward pointing, leaning, walking, and talking. They make scale felt before it is understood. They let time occupy space.

Maps are social objects. The map creates communities around itself: Qingdao cartographers, a video call, books in San Francisco, third graders in a gym, and now you, looking through these images.

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Information needs artifacts. Not only designs, insights, and pixels. Not only textbook paragraphs. Not only thumbnails and captions. Artifacts. Things with surfaces. Things with weight. Things that require care. Things that command a room. Things that require logistics.

This is where Qingdao’s map-ism becomes more than a design label. It is compelling because it treats maps as cultural instruments. The Zheng He scroll is not an efficient way to deliver facts about Ming voyages. The scroll is better because it is less convenient.

Convenience is not the only virtue in learning. Friction can be good too. Good friction sparks our contemplation. The Qingdao scroll demands good friction. It asks us to slow down, handle carefully, gather around, and travel through the map in time.

Afterward, I returned the map to its wooden rollers. The scroll returned to its box. The gym returned to being a gym. But the room had already been changed.

The scroll crossed the Pacific and, for a morning, made a school gym into a map room.

The best maps do not merely represent a world. They convene one.

Onward!—RJ

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Some images call to one another. That is the premise of Chartography’s inspiration double-shots: far-flung works juxtaposed so their hidden kinships can glow.

Today’s pairings range from oceans to neon, moth wings to eclipses, stitched objects to impossible forests. A fun adventure in seeing more.

Vincent Laforet, San Francisco | Simon Theuma, Dreamtime

Rose Sanderson, Cyrestis thyodamas mabella | Karl Sascha Schneider, Old Surehand (1904)

Corey Cavagnolo | G. Kero, Spring Summer 2025

NASA Juno, Jupiter | Edward Burtynsky, Thjorsá River #1 Iceland (2012)

NASA, Orion, Moon backlit by the Sun (2026) | Lance Wyman, eclipse stamp (1970)

Jan Venema | Ulla-Stina Wikander, Sewing Machine

Gustave Doré, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1877) | Illustrated London News, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' studio where he made the Crystal Palace dinosaur (1853)

Keith Macgregor, Hong Kong | Noah Scalin, Sprinkles (2017)

Hayden Sherman, Batman 89 | Hiro Isono

Melody Tuttle, Nocturne in Blue and Orange (2022) | Gerard DuBois, Sisyphus (2021)

Victoria Troynova, vase | Tavares Strachan, Robert (2018)

Francine LeClerq and Ali Soltani, Delft Blue Eyes + Nails | Caskata, HorseshoeCrab platter

If this format is new to you, its earlier editions are here:
A Double-Shot of Inspiration
Another Double-Shot of Inspiration
A Third Double-Shot of Inspiration

We really can see more when we look across and between designs. If one of today’s pairings lingers in your mind, send it to someone whose eye you trust.

Onward!—RJ

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Rare-book collecting has a new luxury: you can inspect a century-old atlas online before deciding whether to own it.

I was staring at a Kosho listing for a 1925 volume called 模範統計図集 [Model Statistical Illustration Collection]. Kosho is Japan’s immense online antiquarian marketplace. It is not one shop but a network: many dealers, many standards, one sprawling catalog. The depth is astonishing. The presentation can be maddening.

Many listings have little or no imagery. Product metadata is often just enough to lure you in and leave you guessing.

To me, a cryptic listing does not feel like a description. It feels like a challenge. OpenAI helped me translate, disambiguate listings, and locate a digitized copy in HathiTrust. The book has dozens of colorful charts, like this one:

The order of operations has flipped: I no longer have to buy first and inspect later.

That should have simplified the hunt. It did the opposite.

I asked AI for more titles like this one, and a door unlocked. Then I asked it for better search terms. 統計図 [statistical charts, duh] threw that door open wide.

Then AI introduced me to the National Diet Library’s beautiful digitization, which quickly became my prime source for discovery and reference. One chart book became dozens. I inspected over a hundred possibilities. The original listing widened into a network of leads: prefectural atlases, cute municipal chart paperbacks, technical ministry bulletins, and eventually a monumental publication about Japan’s rebuilding after the Great Kantō Earthquake.

At a certain point, I was no longer finding books. I was discovering a world: chart-rich, prewar, often beautiful, and in some cases likely never before shelved in this hemisphere.

Soon it became clear that these were not isolated curiosities. They belonged to a coordinated 1920s campaign to make statistical thinking public.

Here’s what it’s like viewing charts on the National Diet Library’s digital archive. Notice that brilliant chart, and then see how it is one of dozens in the volume.

A digitized library copy could answer whether a work was worth owning. A bookseller’s listing could answer whether a particular copy was worth buying, because condition and price still mattered. AI was most useful in the messy middle: transliteration, bibliography, and navigating market customs during seller communication well enough for me to act. That is a more modest claim than machine genius. It is also the more important one. Rare-book collecting fails when friction wins.

Once I sensed that world—1920s Japanese charts—I wanted a system for judging it. I began sorting discoveries into starred folders based on digitized copies. Four stars meant the full package: mostly graphics, color, and designs that felt strange, special, or sophisticated. Three stars meant serious promise. Lower stars could still contain interesting material, but not enough to make the object irresistible.

The funnel itself was revealing. Of the pre-1930 titles I surfaced in the National Diet Library, only about half had digitized scans. Of those, maybe one in five looked genuinely worth pursuing. Of those, only about half seemed to have a promising lead on Kosho. The search felt vast, but it was still incomplete. There is much more out there waiting to be found.

AI did not bring taste to the table. It brought traction. I was still the one deciding which artifacts had heat. The machine helped me sort titles, old and modern script variants, seller shorthand, publication dating, and edition confusions that usually slow collecting to a crawl. But I still had to look and decide whether the thing was alive.

That work of judgment is the old task, and the permanent one. The interesting story here is not that AI helped me buy some books. The interesting story is that it helped me scale my judgment. A digitized version could tell me about the work. The seller could tell me about the copy. The machine could help me get from uncertainty to intelligible options. But the wanting still had to come from me. Good collecting begins with taste: knowing when a book is actually worth chasing.

Soon the books themselves began to make an argument. Chasing the Model Statistical Illustration Collection led me to the 1925 Cabinet Statistical Exhibition in Tokyo, and that changed the meaning of the book completely. This was not just another old volume of charts. It was the printed afterlife of a three-day public exhibition mounted to spread statistical thinking, publicize that year’s simplified census and unemployment survey, and promote thrift, efficiency, and improved daily life. The exhibition reportedly gathered hundreds of charts, books, posters, and other items from government offices, schools, private companies, and newspapers.

Several forces were converging at once: census bureaucracy gave these charts data; industrialization and labor unrest gave them social problems to visualize; the Great Kantō Earthquake gave them urgency; mass politics and mass media gave them audiences; efficiency discourse gave them a moral vocabulary; empire and cartography gave them spatial techniques; and Japan’s already sophisticated print and graphic culture gave them a broader visual ecosystem..

From there, the chase ran outward into late-1920s serial chart publications, technical ministry work, prefectural atlases, and commemorative volumes. What began as a shopping problem turned into a fabulous parade. These books suggest a moment when charts in Japan stopped being occasional illustrations and started becoming part of the regular equipment of administration. Charts did not suddenly appear in Japan in the 1920s. But somewhere in the years after the Great Kantō Earthquake, when modern industrialization exploded, they began to harden into one of the state’s routine instruments for seeing, persuading, and governing.

The logistics mattered too. This was not one miraculous purchase. It was eight separate orders placed to Japanese dealers through Kosho, totaling 19 volumes.

The dealers did not ship directly to me in the United States. They shipped to a middleman forwarding service in Japan, which consolidated the books into a single box and sent that box onward across the Pacific. It was not elegant. It was slow. The fees were annoying. I even got hit with tariffs along the way, which books are not supposed to attract. But the important point is this: the apparatus worked. Books that would otherwise have remained tantalizingly out of reach, for a century, crossed the ocean.

Scale changed the feeling of the project. One purchase can still be a curiosity. Nineteen volumes start to constitute evidence. By the time the forwarding service had done its work and the consolidated shipment reached me in the United States, this no longer felt like I had found a few exotic books. It felt like I had pulled a whole tributary of graphic history into view.

After unboxing, the books covered my studio table.

The near-complete run of the Current Affairs Statistical Atlas, at the top of the table, deserves special mention, because it changed the hunt from selective acquisition to something more archival. At first the set looked risky. The set was incomplete by one volume. The total price was not trivial. The sheer quantity threatened to turn desire into burden. But once I inspected the digitized versions, the logic changed. The chart density was real. The creativity was real. The purchase no longer felt like a burden. It felt like an extraordinary opportunity.

That is where the essay stops being only about Japan. My collecting thesis has been expansionary and optimistic for years: There are many more great historic graphics in the world than current conversations admit. These graphics are missing from books, lectures, collections, presentations, and popular histories not because they are necessarily minor, but because archives are deep, digitization is partial, and habits of attention are narrow. A huge amount of the contemporary graphic-history conversation has been shaped by Western researchers, Western institutions, Western archive access, and Western language comfort. That does not make the resulting canon false. It does make it partial.

And the biggest gap I feel between popular Western acknowledgement and the surviving record may be in Asia. That is not an attempt to flatten all histories into one or deny the foundational importance of early modern and industrial developments in Europe and North America. Plenty of the great breakthroughs really did happen there. But it is one thing to say that. It is another to imagine that the current map of recognized masterpieces is complete. It is not.

Language barriers, cultural distance, uneven digitization, weak collaboration across archives, and long habits of Western indifference have all helped keep Asian material less visible than it should be. I am not a Japan scholar. My edge here is is appetite, pattern-recognition, and nearly a decade of collecting. I spent 2008 in Beijing as a science diplomat for the U.S. National Science Foundation. I have also lived in San Francisco amid Asian-American communities long enough to understand how provincial American attention can remain while still imagining itself worldly. That background does not make me an expert. It does make me less willing to confuse familiarity with importance.

That skepticism has paid. Again and again I have found works that the present has not yet fully learned how to value. Sometimes the market does not know what it is holding. Sometimes the archive is too deep. Sometimes the metadata is too weak. Sometimes the language barrier is enough to keep a whole class of artifacts outside ordinary recognition. But the work survives anyway. That is the optimistic part. The world is still full of precious things that have not yet been properly acknowledged as such.

That optimism is not abstract for me. It is sitting here in my studio library. These books are reminders that historical importance and present recognition do not move in lockstep. A work can be visually ambitious, historically revealing, and still remain only dimly visible to the people who would care most about it. That lag between value and acknowledgement is a collector’s edge.

That is the feeling I have now, surrounded by these Japanese statistical books. Not completion. Not triumph. Something more unstable and more exciting: possibility. The near-complete run of Current Affairs Statistical Atlas alone could keep me busy for months. And the larger payoff still astonishes me. After tracing the growth of Japanese statistical graphics through the 1920s, through reconstruction, efficiency, municipal ambition, and bureaucratic self-education, I ended up holding the Comprehensive Overview of the Imperial Capital Reconstruction Project, a 1931 monumental two-volume work on rebuilding Tokyo after the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. That’s the same catastrophe that seems to have helped accelerate Japan’s appetite for visual statistical explanation. It’s packed with foldout charts and maps across two handsome volumes.

The back cover of Saga Prefecture Statistics Collection from 1929 features the parable of the blind men and an elephant. What a beautiful metaphor for a bunch of charts.

It does not feel like the end of a spree. It feels like the opening of a vault. Every one of these books seems to contain several Chartography essays at once.

And if this much was waiting in one corner of one market, then much more is still out there: shelved, scanned, misdescribed, untranslated, and waiting for someone with enough curiosity and taste to notice.

Onward!—RJ

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Data graphics are powerful. Data graphics are also homeless. It’s a weird quirk of our trade.

Charts influence almost everything—medicine, journalism, business, science, public policy—yet our field has rarely enjoyed a single institutional home. It’s not owned by statistics. It’s not owned by design. It’s not owned by cartography, computer science, or journalism either. In different decades, different parts of society carried its torch. It advances everywhere, which is part of why it’s so useful, and why it’s so beautiful.

But that scattering has a cost: the people who make charts for a living are often floating, untethered to much tradition. We solve the immediate problem. We move on.

That’s where Michael Friendly’s contribution is unusually important.

Michael Friendly is a quantitative psychologist and Professor at York University in Toronto. You might know his Milestones Project—or his R packages for statistical graphics, especially for categorical data and multivariate models. He’s enthusiastic about both on Bluesky.

Friendly is also co-author of History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication, with Howard Wainer. Like Wainer, Friendly studied at RPI and then Princeton, where he arrived just after John Tukey founded Princeton’s statistical department.

Like many, I first encountered Friendly through his Milestones Project—one of the best “map rooms” we have for the history of data visualization. Since then, his research has enlightened and inspired my own career. His work on moral-statistics visionary André-Michel Guerry, for example, taught me about the birth of modern public data and the resulting emergence of social science. Friendly’s passion for Guerry also directly inspired my investigation of Florence Nightingale’s statistical graphics.

Friendly and I have shared our joy for historic charts and collaborated a bit, particularly on a radiant-diagrams paper tracing the history of Nightingale’s polar-area charts. I am also a member of Les Chevaliers des Albums de Statistique Graphique, which he founded. After years of digital friendship, we met in person at the Barry Ruderman Conference at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center.

I recently wrote a formal recommendation letter for Michael. With his permission, I’m reshaping the core of it into this edition of Chartography.

Every field needs someone who keeps it from forgetting itself.

Michael Friendly has been that person for data graphics. Friendly has spent decades doing something that sounds soft until you’ve tried to do it: giving data graphics a memory.

Not nostalgia. Not “look at this quaint antique.” Actual working memory: standards, techniques, lineages, prototypes, dead ends, and rediscoveries.

When you have that kind of memory, a field behaves differently. You stop mistaking novelty for progress. You become harder to impress (in a healthy way). You gain range. You start to see the present as one moment in a long, collective project: How do we make reality more visible? How do we share those visions?

This is why I think of his work as service—not to a single institution, but to the whole messy, multidisciplinary culture of data graphics.

The Milestones Project is not a scrapbook—it’s infrastructure

If you only know one Friendly contribution, make it his Milestones Project.

It’s a curated, scholarly backbone for the history of data visualization. It pairs “what happened” with “why it mattered.” Old work is treated as technical and intellectual material—not just decoration.

.

And Friendly doesn’t just point at milestones; he explains them.

In his writing on Minard, Guerry, the scatterplot, van Langren, and the heat map, he’s doing the kind of recovery work that makes history usable. He reconstructs the problem the original designer was solving—the constraints, the questions, the tools, the intent.

An example that I love inserting into my talks is Friendly’s telling of Minard’s famous map of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Friendly looks past it as mere “brilliant encoding” and sees it as antiwar protest by a 90-year-old engineer who had seen war up close:

In fact, there is a more personal and more emotive meaning to this graphic—as an antiwar statement by an engineer who had witnessed the horrors of war in his youth and who, in his final year, was forced to flee his home as the Prussian army approached Paris in September 1870. [Minard’s obituary] says, “Finally, .. . as if he could sense the terrible disaster that was about to disrupt the country, he illustrated the loss of lives that had been caused by ... Hannibal and Napoleon. ... The graphical representation is gripping;. .. it inspires bitter reflections on the human cost of the thirst for military glory.”

That’s classic Friendly—he sees the graphic and human experience as one.

He’s not only a historian of charts. He’s a builder of them.

This is the part that often gets missed by people who only know Friendly through the history work.

He’s not standing outside the field with a clipboard. He’s been inside it for decades, building modern statistical graphics: mosaic displays, HE plots, and a wide set of R tools and methods.

That matters because it changes the texture of his histories. He knows where the difficulty actually is. He knows what a “small” invention costs in practice. He knows what survives contact with real data and real audiences.

So when he says a historical graphic is ingenious, you can trust that it’s not just aesthetic admiration. It’s a practitioner’s respect.

Friendly the ambassador

The other thing Friendly gives the field is tone. He’s a joyful person to be around, a walking advertisement for nominative determinism.

He’s rigorous without being gatekeepy—and still clearly delighted by the work. I’ve seen him do this live. At the David Rumsey Map Center’s Ruderman Conference, his “Celebration” keynote (on Les Chevaliers) combined reverence and restlessness. Admire prior art, but don’t be trapped by it.

His web presence and public talks keep pulling historical material back into the present—where it can actually do work for people. That’s the right posture for a field like ours.

A short lineage

If you want to place Friendly in a lineage, it’s a small one.

In the 19th century, Étienne‑Jules Marey helped articulate the graphic method with scientific seriousness. In the early 20th, Howard Funkhouser surveyed statistical graphics with a historian’s sweep. Friendly carries that baton into the digital era, with an extra twist: he combines the historian’s archive with the builder’s workshop, and he’s unusually approachable while doing it.

Plenty of people can make charts.

Fewer can invent new graphical tools.

Fewer still can explain where our tools came from—and why the old work still matters.

Michael Friendly has done all of that, steadily, for decades. And the effect is simple: he made it harder for the rest of us to be careless with history.

Which is a gift.

Onward!—RJ

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

We picked through 200 years of inequality charts and maps. In one sense, we are still grappling with the same challenges as Charles Dupin: understanding and comparing distributions. As we saw, the struggle is rich with new visual forms and analytic surprises.

You may also enjoy my recent associated essay on the topic:

Onward!—RJ

Subscribe now

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

Imagine you are watching a strange parade of people march by. Each person is sized by the money they make. A person of average height has an average income. Someone a little shorter than average makes a little less. Someone a little taller than average makes a little more. The first people in the parade are invisible, they are all in debt. Then, tiny folks no bigger than matchsticks flutter by. The parade continues, each marcher slightly taller than the last. Each marcher slightly richer than the last. The last person is a man of inconceivable height, several miles tall.

This parade vision is how Dutch economist Jan Pen gave readers a visceral introduction to economic inequality data in his 1971 book Income Distribution. Pen’s parade is modern and playful. But the impulse behind it, to make inequality visible, is much older. Over the past two centuries, we’ve developed a suite of ways to measure and visualize inequality.

Data graphics are machines for comparison. They let us see two groups side by side and ask: why are they different? The visual inquiry of inequality is a magical tool that has led to understanding and progress of many sorts.

Today, Wednesday February 25th, I’m talking live with , who writes the popular newsletter. His work looks beyond income and wealth inequalities to chart other ways America is unevenly distributed. Join us for our discussion here:

https://open.substack.com/live-stream/116379

To prepare for my chat with Jeremy, I reviewed the history of visualizing inequality.

This year we celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of Charles Dupin’s education map calling for the expansion of schools. What follows is a whirlwind tour of my favorite graphic gestures at understanding and conveying inequality since Dupin’s choropleth map, 200 years ago.

Moral statistics in space

Charles Dupin’s map (below left) is shaded by student density, expressed as a productivity measure: how much population is needed to “supply” a male pupil. Lighter districts have a higher proportion of students. He used the map and its accompanying tables to argue that education is the foundation of scientific and industrial power, education produces wealth, and education is correlated with a positive financial return. With Dupin’s map, administrative space became a statistical surface.

Early inequality visualizations were similar to Dupin’s map: French districts shaded in grays to show a variety of newly published state data. They were part of a movement called moral statistics sparked by André-Michel Guerry and championed by Adolphe Quetelet (1830s examples from both above). They advanced the radical idea that social phenomena obey laws, that society could be studied with the same scientific rigor as physics.

Moral statistics was particularly concerned with correlations between poverty and health outcomes—an association which still fascinates us.

By 1900, choropleth maps had traveled beyond France. They became colorful and more precise, with a late-century burst of vibrant examples tracking economic data at the building level: London poverty by Charles Booth (1889), Chicago wages by Hull-House (1895), and Philadelphia social-classes by W.E.B. Du Bois (1899)—all detailed below.

Economist curves

Maps are pretty. They are also powerful declarations of the breadth of available data. But it’s hard to claim precise assessments of inequality across hundreds of marks on a map.

For these kinds of behavior insights, inequality data must be compressed—abstracted—into summary values. Graphically, we also followed suit. Instead of making marks where people lived we piled them into buckets, stacked them in columns, and plotted abstract markers of populations as line-graph curves.

Maps show where inequality lives. Curves show how inequality behaves, across a population and across time.

Many of these statistical inventions survive in the modern analytic imagination, including: Pareto’s power-law distribution of income distribution (1896, below left) and Max Lorenz’s curves expressing the inequality of income and wealth distributions by comparing them to the 45° angle of equality (1905, below right).

Later, Corrado Gini reduced the gap between Lorenz’s curve and equality to a single number (1914), further compressing and abstracting inequality measures.

As tax systems and household surveys expanded, so did the data available to compress into curves. With new data and new statistical tools, nations and NGOs produced serious charts across the twentieth century of all sorts of inequalities. You can see these new ways of showing economic inequality in action in Wesley Mitchell’s Income in the United States (1921, below).

Another example of this genre is a 1938 package of charts by the U.S. National Resource Committee. I like how, together, they show that anchoring your buckets to different dimensions changes the analytic lens. Below, see the same data presented by income level, aggregate income, and families:

Selling inequality to the public

Post-WW1 corporate and government policy charts were often austerely-styled. But all color was not lost.

The 1930s and 1940s also saw a boom in persuasive (and propaganda) graphics in magazines and trade books for the masses. They used data graphics to attract attention and advocate for a cause. The finest examples of this genre were designed by Otto Neurath’s Isotype Institute. For example, see the below inequality charts from There’s Work for All (1945).

I particularly love chart VI (left), which gives 1% marks to both wealth and people, especially contrasted against the more conventional income towers of chart IX (right), which remind me of Pen’s Parade. See hundreds (and growing!) Isotype examples in my new explorer: https://isotype.infowetrust.com

Inequality goes digital

The Internet amplified all of these approaches to visualizing inequality. In my lifetime, there’s been an explosion of books and policy documents littered with global and national inequality charts. Some earned cute nicknames: Alan Krueger’s “Gatsby curve” shows higher income inequality associated with lower intergenerational mobility (2012, left). The Lakner-Milanovic “elephant curve” shows the unequal distribution of income growth for individuals belonging to different income groups (2013, right).

YouTube has given us a new medium for data storytelling: the mass-consumed short video.

In living memory, Hans Rosling used this new tool to best effect, painting dramatic stories of economic and health progress using digital morphing magic (left) and channeling Isotype with simple props that represent large aggregate values (right: each box represents 1 billion people across an income spectrum).

In 2012, Politizane published a viral video that dramatized the extreme differences between how we think about inequality compared to actual inequality:

More extravagant charts were developed too. Below is a stereogram set by Jack Blundell showing income deciles between 1980 (top) and 2014 (bottom). Each set is colored by the country’s 1980 position, which highlights extreme jumps in rank (see China). The richest decile for each country is in the back.

Early inequality graphics obsessed over poverty. Today, we obsess over billionaires.

This is expressed graphically by charting the rising dominance of the top 1%. For example, see the increasing share of national income by the top 1% (red) compared to the bottom 50% (blue) in the 2018 World Inequality Report.

I hope you are able to join Jeremy and me as we discuss these and other examples of visualizing inequality. https://open.substack.com/live-stream/116379

The graphic comparison at the heart of inequality—us versus them, rich and poor, haves and have-nots—feels older than money itself. The forms will keep changing. The comparison will not.

Onward!—RJ

Attention San Francisco!

I will be speaking about data-graphic masterpieces this Saturday at ABAA California International Antiquarian Book Fair at Pier 27. Details: https://www.abaa.org/event/speaker-schedule

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

I’ve been cooking—building an original archive explorer from my collection of Isotype Institute charts and maps, so I can find fresh insights and inspiration in seconds.

Now I can search charts the way my designer brain wants: by chart type, features, and color. I’ve also loaded it with publication metadata and OCR text.

You can play with Isotype Explorer too. Right here:

Isotype Explorer

So far, it includes 129 figures from 10 different publications. Here’s what the user interface looks like:

Isotype is a favorite source of inspiration for me and many information designers. For the uninitiated:

Isotype shows data with pictorial symbols. It consists of standardized methods and abstracted pictograms to represent social-scientific data.

Isotype is associated with Otto Neurath and his collaborators. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, originating in the 1920s at the Gesellschafts und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Social and Economic Museum of Vienna). The term Isotype was applied to the method in the 1930s, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna amid the rise of Austrian fascism.

This effort is inspired by:

• David Rumsey—digitization and open access

• Letterform Archive—gorgeous archival UI

• Jason Forrest—shared Isotype enthusiasm

• E-commerce—filtering & sorting that respects intent

Isotype Explorer has a few neat views. The grid view is great for discovery. Here it is with random sort, which creates unexpected juxtapositions.

The publication view helps you understand the total catalog. It’s shown below demonstrating chart and color filters.

The figure lightbox (below) details a single figure. Open it to read publication context, plus original caption text when relevant.

I find searching by a specific chart type to be really useful. Try: filter Type → Map → Choropleth (or just search “choropleth”).

The search bar queries publication and figure metadata, plus OCR text. You can also search by token keys. It currently supports: type, work (= publication), year, feature, and series. I’ve also added a British-to-American dictionary because these are mostly British publications. The tool understands theater and theatre, color and colour.

Despite these books being within arm’s reach for years, I never noticed some of their brilliant figures. For example, here is "Burden of Total Taxation.” I love how it compresses stacks of dots horizontally while maintaining the same diverging deciles.

Here is another surprise to me, “How Syphilis spread to the Old World.” It’s a perfect balance and density of arrows and symbols.

The whole site tracks state in the URL, so it’s easy to share any chart or filtered view. For example:

https://isotype.infowetrust.com/#/?sort=oldest&view=publications&id=w0002-p0088-f99

And it’s all original, including new photography, color correction, metadata, and website design by me.

I have many more publications, and hundreds of figures, to add.

You can help by playing around at isotype.infowetrust.com and let me know what you think.

• Reply with the coolest chart you find.

• Tell me what filter you wish existed.

• Flag any bugs you run into.

I gave some attention to mobile design, but it’s really best on your biggest screen. Enjoy.

Onward!—RJ

Isotype Explorer

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Read more

When was the last time a new map really sparked joy in your life?

I am the proud recipient of “Daona-Youjiang: Echoes of the Rice Fields.” It’s a spectacular scroll map by the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Institute of Mapping. It’s over two meters wide.

Geographically, the map centers on China’s Youjiang River Basin in Guangxi province. Thematically, the map elevates the Zhuang people’s rice cultivation traditions, focusing on 那 (Nà) culture—“sweet” fertile lands.

To understand why this map exists, you need to meet the Zhuang people.

The Zhuang are the largest ethnic minority in China. Most live in southern China, especially in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, where they have lived for thousands of years. They have their own language, traditions, and festivals.

You can see Zhuang textile inspirations in the map’s indigo background and brocade framing. Zhuang clothing is known for its deep indigo dyes and bold geometric patterns, often accented with silver jewelry. Traditional Zhuang brocade—handwoven on wooden looms—includes patterns that encode stories, nature, and good fortune.

The map blends modern GIS techniques with traditional visual identities to depict Zhuang culture.

White waterways thread through bright yellow rice paddies—whose areas are derived from aerial imagery.

那 (Nà) is a phonetic loan-character from Mandarin used to represent ‘sweet’ or fertile land in the Zhuang language. Many places in Guangxi, such as the city of Nanning, incorporate the 那 character in their name. Scores of place names that incorporate 那 across the river basin are labeled on the map.

The geographic map is augmented with hand-drawn depictions of agricultural practices and festival customs of the Zhuang.

The way the map balances color is sublime. I particularly love its ocean of blues and pops of magenta.

I received the map over a live virtual exchange with its designers, who are Zhuang. In return, I sent them books from Visionary Press. Our common goal was to learn about each other’s craft, gain new inspiration, and build harmonious bridges across the Pacific. Let’s call it design diplomacy.

Despite so much distance, I felt a wonderful kindred spirit talking maps with designers dedicated to information-graphic excellence. I’m impressed by people using map-design so successfully to attract attention to their cause: promoting Zhuang culture.

They told me that the map is an expression of their feelings, emotions, and respect for Zhuang art and culture.

The team is, from left to right:
▪ Lan Jing, art designer
▪ Lan Rumen, map designer
▪ Hu Weibin, head of cultural and creative industry
▪ He Jiaheng, text editor

From our time together, I learned that in addition to indigo cloth, the map’s color scheme is inspired by the multi-colored glutinous/sticky rice of the Zhuang people.

And, if that wasn’t enough rice: The overall shape of the map represents the outline of a single grain of rice. (Scroll back up, you’ll see it.)

Part of the map’s design is its superior production. This map is not a JPG image file. It is a seven-foot scroll of lush paper, printed with rich inks, mounted on wooden rollers. Could any JPG image hold a candle to such a performance?

Production matters. Your canvas matters. Packaging matters. On that last note, the map arrived in a custom cloth sleeve that sported many Zhuang hallmarks: silver bangles, geometric brocade, and indigo blue. I’m considering fabricating a wooden box for it for long-term protection.

In-person matters too. The map is not a quiet object. The map is a bridge to new exchanges, new experiences, and new people.

The map gave me cause to connect with its inspiring designers, thousands of miles away. Today, it’s reason for us to gather in San Francisco, where it has already gone on display to information-designers in my studio, and Chinese-Americans at a local school. Come visit me in Dogpatch and you can enjoy it in-person too.

Before I go, one important note for paid subscribers: Soon I will send another newsletter inviting you to preview my latest project. It relates to Isotype Institute designs. I think you’re going to love it.

Onward!—RJ

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Spurred by critique of his first design, Luigi Perozzo released an augmented version of his stereogram in 1881—adding “isotomic” (quantile) lines and publishing the plate with Latin inscriptions for international circulation.

It is with this second version that Perozzo adopts the word stereogramma.

As a refresher, the first design used a skeuomorphic volume to chart Swedish male cohorts over history. It used four colors, all employed again in his second design:

🟥 Red is years, from 1750 (left) to 1875 (right). Every 25 years gets a thick line.

⬜️ Gray is age, from birth (background) to 100-years-old (foreground).

🟦 Blue traces cohorts, everyone born in the same period.

🟩 Green marks constant population counts, isolines.

[Catch up with part 1 of this essay to better understand Perozzo’s 3-D project.]

In addition to being published in Latin, because he was sending copies to other national statistical offices, Perozzo’s second design boasted two new colors: golden yellow and orange. They are his attempt to make his stereogram more useful.

The new colors mark population quantiles. Perozzo called these lines “isotomic cuts”—cuts that divide a population into equal chunks. Eight quantiles, for example, divide a population into eight equal chunks.

Perozzo included two kinds of cuts, labeled in Latin: CENSITORUM SECTRICES (census cuts, yellow) and SUPERSTITUM SECTRICES (survivor/cohort cuts, orange).

🟨 Yellow lines slice a red year’s population into equal chunks.

🟧 Orange lines slice a blue cohort’s population into equal chunks.

The orange lines are relatively short because there are only a few cohorts in the data born early enough to reach age 100 by 1875.

Perozzo’s colors are engaging. But are they useful? It’s hard to say with historic Swedish data. Let’s try something closer to now.

I applied Perozzo’s method to the United States, illustrating its population since 1900, below.

Note that this is total population, not birth and survivorship curves. It encompasses many phenomena including birthrate and immigration.

I’ve never seen my own country in such meticulous detail. Here’s what I notice (annotated below):

🅐 First hump, which begins around 1920: high births (spurred partially by parents from the largest immigration wave in early 1900s) and improving child survival rate (water filtration and chlorination).

🅑 Silent generation valley: low births during Great Depression and WW2, plus low immigration after restrictive 1924 Immigration Act.

🅒 Post-WW2 baby boom, a big ridge that persists through time

🅓 Gen-X valley, and echo of the silent generation valley

🅔 Echo ridge: baby boomer kids

🅕 Fewer baby-boom grandchildren

🅖 Noticeable rise in 100+ year-olds by 2025

From one perspective, the story isn’t about the ridges. It’s about that Depression/WW2/immigrant-exclusion valley. That valley contrasts surrounding terrain to make them look like booms. That valley echoes forward with a smaller Gen-X population.

The yellow lines cut the solid into quantiles, each with equal population.

I find that the stereogram’s perspective and overall rise in population make these quantiles hard to read. For example, the yellow line in the foreground advances forward in age in the data, starting well below fifty-years-old in 1900 and ending above fifty by 2025. However, it optically moves backwards in the graphic.

This prompted me to return to 2-D to look at two slices from the stereogram, the 1900- and 2025 population profiles. These are the left and right walls of the stereogram, below.

Empty white lines cut into each year to make quartiles. Visually you can get a sense that each chunk represents the same equal population.

Remember, each is showing the character of the population in a given year, not the survivorship of a particular birth cohort. Seeing 1900 and 2025 like this advance three critical observations (beyond the fact that the second shape is much bigger because our total population is bigger):

• The shapes of the two populations are very different. 1900 is a triangle, loaded with kids and trailing off rather constantly. It’s a young country. 2025’s shape is more boxy, like a rectangle.

• There is a decade-plus quartile shift. The median age (middle white line) shifts from early 20s to late 30s. In 1900, 25% of the population were kids younger than 11!

• Reading the top ridge of 2025, detailed below, shows us that named generations are more than just marketing speak. Unique peaks and valleys suggest that our population composition will keep changing over time—and with it the composition of our interests and needs.

The USA stereogram differs in one significant way from Perozzo’s Sweden.

USA charts all population in a given year while Perozzo charted the survivorship of birth cohorts. The nice thing about his dataset is that the resulting cohort line always decreases. You might know this as monotonic.

A monotonic curve works great in 3-D because monotonic survivorship avoids overhangs, reversals, and other weird self‑intersections that inhibit views. They are more “terrain-like.”

USA’s full population is a different story. Its bumpy ridges block background valleys. The ridges also create difficult saddle-shape cells and ugly sawtooth transitions. For me, it was technically more challenging to render USA than recreating Sweden. Most critically, a ridge obscures populations behind it and makes it difficult to understand the full shape of the stereogram.

While they are the most enduring, Swedish stereograms weren’t the only fabulous vision that Perozzo pursued. Today we could render USA as a spinning object. We could slice and dice it digitally. We could even 3-D print it. But for now, I’ll just do what Perozzo did and pair the front view with a back view.

Having the back view shows us that, aside from the Gen-X valley, the original front view wasn’t missing too much (even though it felt like it was). The back view also reveals the Newborn curve and the age-profile of 1900.

There’s more to be gained from reviving sophisticated volumes. I look forward to developing more stereograms with other types of data.

Onward!—RJ

p.s. Paid subscribers get a bonus behind-the-scenes look at how I visually debugged the USA stereogram. Keep scrolling to the bottom of this newsletter to see.

For your radar

Three timely updates:

Nightingale talk + discount

On January 29th I am delivering a talk at the Florence Nightingale museum, “God’s Revenge Upon Murder” about Nightingale’s mortality diagrams.

Watch on Zoom or attend the London watch party at the Nightingale museum. Free, but registration is required.

Nightingale talk details

Plus, I’ve discounted my Nightingale book in honor of this talk. Order one from Visionary Press.

Principles of Data Graphics

I’m returning to Cooper Union to teach a five-session workshop starting April 21st, all virtual—but very alive and very interactive. We always have a blast with this class, it usually sells out so don’t dawdle.

Workshop Details

Freshy-fresh website

A nasty performance bug sucked me into a complete re-design of my online presence: avatars, images, copy, pages—you name it and I improved it.

This includes a new logo and color kit for Chartography (did you notice?) and a totally refreshed portfolio website. Check it out:

infowetrust.com

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Read more

There’s a data graphic that has long-captured imaginations.

Its first version looks like this:

I’ve long marveled at this graphic, without really understanding how it works or why it came to be. Aesthetic appeal held my admiration—it’s like something from a steampunk future that never was.

They called this chart type a stereogram, named from the Greek stereos, solid, for its voluminous heft. They also considered calling it a triagram, recognizing that diagram references two dimensions, but rejected this as an impractical neologism. Today, you might know “stereogram” from Magic Eye optical illusions, a slightly different usage.

Over the past months, I’ve chased down (and acquired some of) its variants, read several contemporary papers about its development, and reconstructed the stereogram as an interactive digital version. I’ll show you the interactive in a moment.

Perozzo’s dream

The stereogram shows Sweden’s male live births and survivors by age class over time.

It was published by Luigi Perozzo, a twenty-four-year-old Italian engineer and statistician, in an 1880 volume of Annali di Statistica.

Perozzo chose Sweden because it boasted impressive national population statistics: centralized, continuous, frequent, and age-specific censuses since 1749 collected by the Church of Sweden. It was the very best data set from which to build a time-sequenced 3-D surface.

Why does seeing a population matter? If you manage a state, insurance company, or pension, then it is critical to understand demographic statistics. Perozzo created the diagram chasing two goals, which are often in graphic tension:

1. Represent statistics as clearly and precisely as possible.

2. Elevate analytic insights such as summaries, variation, and uncertainty.

Perozzo was convinced his stereogram could accomplish both goals simultaneously.

Graphically, Perozzo was inspired by contour and relief representations at the 1878 Congrès international de démographie in Paris. In particular, he singled out an 1860s chart by Fredrik Berg, the first head of Sweden’s Statistiska central-byråns.

Mathematically, the stereogram-approach built on the work of a group of German visionaries including Georg Knapp, Karl Becker, Wilhelm Lexis, and especially Gustav Zeuner. To get his particular 3-D projection, Perozzo blended Zeuner’s three-axis approach with a 60° tilt inspired by Hungarian Jakab Lewin.

As part of Perozzo’s skeuomorphic perspective development, he also seemed to explore the data by fabricating physical models—but the extant evidence of this is thin.

Perozzo’s design research and development helped him recognize that a 3-D object brings clarity to particular features of a population and makes its overall character more memorable. He wanted to make population feel more real and the stereogram was how to do it.

How it works

To detail Perozzo’s stereogram, I’m going to use my digital rendition, which allows us to establish it in layers. Then we’ll see what it has to say.

Start with a 2-D grid, below.

🟥 The red horizontal dimension is years, from 1750 to 1875. Every 25 years gets a thick line. Every five years gets a thin line.

⬜️ The gray dimension is age, also marked in 25- and 5-year increments, from birth to 100-years-old in the foreground. (This project taught me that quinquennial is the term for every five years.)

These are the x- and y-axes. This grid is the base of the stereogram.

Next, raise every intersection in the grid to a height representing the population size at that point. For example, the gold ring below marks how many men were in the 25-year-old age bucket in the year 1775. (That bucket includes all men ages 21-25).

With points meshed into a 3-D surface, add shading to reinforce the stereogram’s dimensionality.

On top of the 3-D surface, Perozzo layered two analytic colors.

🟦 Blue (below left) traces cohort survivorship. See, for example, how many people were born in 1750 and then follow the line downward until the few survivors of that cohort are 100-years-old in 1850.

🟩 Green (below right) are isolines marking constant values. They help us read how many people exist at each point. For example, you can read the increase in 25-year-olds: 100,000 in 1795 and 150,000 in 1850.

Put all the quinquennial red-gray-blue-green lines together and you get a rather stunning object. Here is Perozzo’s 1880 original again:

At a glance, what can we see?

• A progressive, albeit noisy, increase in number of births. The final 50 years is a population boom. This is emphasized by the large swoopy Linea delle Nascite.

• A harrowing child mortality rate. Each blue line begins with a horrible fall down a steep cliff, from birth to age 10.

• By age 100, nearly everyone is dead.

Then, look a little deeper, sprinkle in a little history, and you will see more.

The stereogram reveals that shocks to birth—war or disease—don’t just show up once. They propagate diagonally as the cohort ages. See how any initial dip in births triggers a diagonal valley that continues through the ages.

These valleys have echoes too. As a smaller cohort reaches adulthood, they produce relatively fewer children, resulting in a new valley. See how births take a dip around 1810, likely because of the Napoleonic wars. Births take another dip 30 years later when the war-thinned cohort reaches family-forming age. Since they are fewer in number, they have fewer children. And then, 30 years later, there is another dip around 1870!

I masked the original stereogram to emphasize these valleys:

The same war echoes for generations. These demographic waves illustrate long-lag consequences, something that Perozzo emphasized would be difficult to appreciate without the stereogram.

Luigi rides again

I transcribed one of Perozzo’s data tables and recreated the stereogram in SVG. It’s now a digital interactive, with a simple tooltip that teaches you how to read the colors:

Digitizing the stereogram taught me how difficult it is to simulate a solid object in a convincing way—a way that balances all design elements. It also exposed how small changes in perspective, color, and shading can totally change the emphasis of the construction.

This project benefited from encouragement by Tony Chu and Santiago Ortiz. You can play with the interactive here:

see interactive

Admiring masterpieces like Perozzo’s stereogram, I have often wondered why we can’t achieve similar lavish levels of design digitally.

The reason is that it is really really hard. The whole thing is an illusion: a pile of 2-D lines and shapes and text, all data-driven, that come together in a convincing way to fool us into thinking it is 3-D. Creating a simulated 3-D object from real demographic tables is hard. Rendering a surface, architectural elements, and labels in the same 3-D coordinate system is hard.

The boon is that I now have a reusable engine, and can do it again, quicker. I can now turn other data sets into 3-D illusions.

A success?

Perhaps you are still not sold on the stereogram. You would be in good company.

Wilhelm Lexis, pioneer of the analysis of demographic time series, translated Perozzo’s paper into German the same year. He followed the translation with his own observation, acknowledging that while three-axis representation is scientifically rigorous, it still may hinder usability.

Because demographic quantities can be related in so many ways, a stereometric (3-D) construction, having one more dimension, can in itself achieve a greater completeness of immediate representation than a planimetric (2-D) one; but these 3-D constructions are more complicated, harder to survey at a glance, and therefore more inconvenient for practical use than the 2-D ones; … so in practice the planimetric constructions will always keep the upper hand.

In response to Lexis, and determined to prove that the stereogram could be useful to practical analysis, Perozzo refined and elaborated his design. The resulting graphic, version two, was published the following year of 1881. It has been lauded by generations of information designers since.

We’ll study Perozzo’s refined vision, and expand his methods to modern visual problems, in a future edition of Chartography.

Onward!—RJ

Update: the second part is here:

Two timely notices for your radar this week:

Nightingale talk + discount

On January 29th I am delivering a talk at the Florence Nightingale museum, “God’s Revenge Upon Murder” about Nightingale’s mortality diagrams.

Watch on Zoom or attend the London watch party at the Nightingale museum. Free, but registration is required.

Nightingale talk details

Plus, I’ve discounted my Nightingale book in honor of this talk. Order one from Visionary Press.

Freshy-fresh website

A nasty performance bug sucked me into a complete re-design of my online presence: avatars, images, copy, pages—you name it and I improved it.

This includes a new logo and color kit for Chartography (did you notice?) and a totally refreshed portfolio website. Check it out:

infowetrust.com

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

The past year of Chartography spanned the philosophy of design, practical know-how, and a lot of inspiration from the history of data graphics. We also launched my new book Info We Trust Remastered and the Maps for Kids poster series.

By the numbers, Chartography was read more than 150,000 times in 2025. That includes the attention of over 1,000 new subscribers. Everyone will benefit from a fresh look at one or more of the top five essays from the past year. Here they are, ordered according to my own capricious whim.

One of 2025’s first essays was a real heater. You ate it up. I still don’t say “data visualization” (except when it gets me paid) and have noticed that “data graphics” is catching on.

I enjoy information philosophy and adore historic charts, but practice is the heart of it all. For any of my theory or research to be valid, it must connect to how I make new charts that have to be really useful. Sometimes it’s a challenge to abstract lessons from my client practice. Not so with “Color Engineering”—it’s an approach that begged to be codified and shared.

It took me a summer of reading and research to come to grips with clarity—a quality often extolled as the ideal of information design. It never sat right with me. Digging into its true meaning revealed why.

A near-acquisition led me to discover the most violent story behind a new chart form. It’s a perfect example of how charts help us claw our way out of disaster. (That acquisition? It happened. But the volume arrived missing its key fold-out chart. The hunt continues.)

I had a theory a few years ago that Nazis, with their mechanical mania and insidious indoctrination, probably made some interesting charts. Since then we’ve surfaced many striking examples worth study. and I examined one collection:

As I review these essays, I’m proud of the variety of stories told. I’m also grateful for the quality of their writing. Writing helps me interrogate the world, make sense of it, and crystallize understanding. I couldn’t sink effort into these if I didn’t know you’d be reading. Thank you for your patronage—your attention, your paid subscriptions, your reply emails, your in-person compliments. They mean a lot.

Writing from the United States, 2025 was a year of upheaval. For those dedicated to craft and advancing our understanding of reality, it wasn’t the most harmonious trip around the sun.

One of the songs I’ve returned to this year is Stevie Wonder’s “As”—for its sermon of a bridge:

We all know sometimes life’s hates and troubles
Can make you wish you were born in another time and space

But you can bet your life times that and twice its double
That God knew exactly where he wanted you to be placed

So make sure when you say you’re in it, but not of it
You’re not helping to make this earth a place sometimes called Hell

Change your words into truth and then change that truth into love
And maybe our children’s grandchildren
And their great-grandchildren will tell
I’ll be loving you

I choose to be cheerful, productive, and strive to engage in as many in-person connections as possible. Looking back, it surprises me how much that attitude helped me be productive, and hopefully bring some good into the world:

• Hosted monthly lunches at my new library/studio in Dogpatch. The amount of design talent we have in one room frequently feels dangerous. Reach out if you are in San Francisco and want to come to the next one.

• Published Info We Trust, Remastered—my love letter to data storytelling, with a book-launch party at Letterform Archive.

• Curated and mounted The Craft of Data Graphics exhibition in New York, elevating the work of living and historic information designers.

• Edited the Clarity summer series, republishing classic essays about information design.

• Two-dozen historic publications collected for my design library. (Come visit it in SF!)

• Launched the new Maps for Kids poster series and sent posters to kids all over. Discounts and free shipping are still available for a short while!

Chartography will return in 2026.

Onward!—RJ

About

Chartography is the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust, by RJ Andrews.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Most world maps skip the main character: life. They carefully mark countries, cities, and borders, but not the plants and animals that make Earth unique. We think that’s foolish.

Earth Biomes is an illustrated wall map, part of the new Maps For Kids poster series. Across three views of our globe, colors mark different biomes—rainforests, deserts, tundras, and more—while ocean blues darken to show where the water runs deep.

The impetus for this design was the need for a traditional geographic map as part of the inaugural Maps for Kids trio. It complements the other two types, a pictorial diagram (Steam Locomotive) and a statistical chart (Food Energy). Together, they make a rich information-graphics demonstration.

This map is a collaboration between us—RJ Andrews and Robert Simmon. Today, we’re going to reveal how we wrestled overwrought boundaries, honed our layout, and finessed delicate color balances. The explanations below are neatly organized. The work itself wasn’t: it was messy and iterative. Our process only emerged by making the thing.

Layout

One of the final steps of our technical pipeline, layout composition, was the first serious design consideration tackled: How do we arrange our globes?

Our poster is inspired by classic double-planisphere maps, which pair two hemispheres side-by-side to display the whole Earth.

For example, we really enjoyed several spreads by Erwin Raisz, such as The Living Planet from his Atlas of Global Geography (1944).

After many attempts, though, we realized that there is no good way to split the Earth into two halves and retain all major landforms unbroken. You really need three views to appreciate major features uninterrupted. Below are early composition attempts, blurred to emphasize visual mass.

These didn’t work. The geometric arrangement on the left feels dead—and its Mickey Mouse ears are distracting. The middle one gives us bigger globes by only displaying a portion of one, but we really need three full views to include New Zealand (whose often omission has Kiwis justifiably upset). The organic flow on the right is too messy.

Our final triangular arrangement is cocked slightly counter-clockwise. This gives dynamic tension; it is more lively than the original triangle’s regularity but not as messy as the organic flow.

Landforms overlap where our three globes nearly touch. To emphasize the southern globe’s flipped relationship to the top two, its text is upside-down.

Data

We started with the World Wildlife Fund’s major habitat types, part of its terrestrial ecosystems dataset. These define 15 biome types (including ice), each with a rather technical name.

Considering our audience, kids and their grown-ups, we combined some biome types, reducing the total to 11. We renamed most. For example, “Tropical & Subtropical Moist Broadleaf Forests” became “Tropical Rainforests”.

You can see the effects of this refactoring in the before and after views of South America. Notice the large grassy region on the right, which includes the Pampas. It was made by combining two original biome types that were hard to distinguish to our audience, seen on the left:

• Temperate grasslands, savannas and shrublands (green)

• Tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas and shrublands (lavender)

Sea-depth bathymetry data was sourced from the GEBCO 2024 Grid. More on that soon.

Representation

Precision is a tricky aspect of maps. Too much detail looks fussy, and can result in distracting artifacts. Too little precision and important features may be distorted or disappear altogether. Ideally, the resolution of the data matches the map’s scale and purpose.

One approach to reducing detail is to remove some of the points that form the edges of features, but this tends to create jagged, artificial boundaries. An alternative solution is to smooth edges. Often, we use a combination of the two techniques.

Smoothing is simple in principle, but can be difficult in practice. Small features tend to disappear—often the very details that make a map intriguing. There’s a balance between enough smoothing to look good, but not so much that it removes important information. The below animation shows before and after-smoothing view of the Gulf of Mexico.

Notice how the coastlines and biome boundaries keep their character while reducing details that would only be distracting noise at our printed poster’s scale.

It required several smoothing attempts to preserve the “Flooded Grasslands and Savannas” covering the southern tip of Florida.

Our bathymetry data also required transformation. We downsampled, smoothed using a Gaussian blur, and quantized into regular contours.

Color

As usual with a map, choosing colors was one of the most challenging design decisions. In this case, we needed to balance discernibility—whether the individual colors stand out from each other—with readability—whether the colors make sense.

Each biome needed to be easy to distinguish from its neighbors, and be recognizable even without reading the legend. Typical qualitative color palettes used for differentiating discrete categories are often garish, filled with highly saturated primary colors.

Maps For Kids is largely inspired by Isotype Institute designs — pictorial statistics for the masses with flat colors and bold symbols. Our biome hues (and degree of smoothing) take direct notes from a 1930 map, Vegetationszonen der Erde, by Otto Neurath.

We chose to use a similar palette, with desaturated Earth-tone hues grouped into similar categories (different types of forest are different shades of green, woodlands and savannas incorporate more yellow, and desert is nearly beige). This choice, combined with merging related biomes, helps reduce visual noise while keeping each biome distinct. It also strikes a fair balance between appearing natural without coming across as a strict physical map. Ben Day patterns (tiny dots floating above the solid colors) further distinguish various forest biomes.

The other issue with color was balancing the biomes with the much larger ocean area. A single ocean fill-color would have emphasized the land, but at the expense of being rather bland. We chose to illustrate low-contrast bathymetry, aggregated into 10 levels with a nonlinear color scale.

Our ocean color ramp is wedged into a narrow value-band that maintains contrast with the ice biome’s white and the background’s cream. We created it in Adobe Illustrator using a custom script that interpolated colors between low and high values.

Inspired by Neurath, we also attempted warm oceans—see below—but determined them too avant garde for an audience that expects water to be blue.

We also considered a dark-background variant, as if the globes were floating in space. Alas, too planetarium.

Our ocean “blue” is in fact shifted subtly toward green to complement the cream-colored paper. The result helps the land areas stand out while giving interesting texture to the large ocean areas, especially in the Southern Hemisphere view.

Text and other annotations

One feature that makes a map a map is its annotations: the text that turns marks on paper into information. In the legend, small icons show the dominant vegetation for each region. Simple gauges indicate temperature and rainfall—two of the key ingredients that define biomes.

On the map itself, we overlaid a faint graticule, giving the globes a sense of volume and quiet authority.

Labeling the biomes was trickier. Many sprawl across multiple countries and languages; some have no common English name at all. We chose to label only the largest biomes, taking cues from the marine and terrestrial physical features in Natural Earth and adapting them for a primarily American audience. Each biome label is set small and in low contrast—you can read it when you go looking, but it mostly disappears when you take in the poster as a whole.

Our small block of introductory text gives just enough for a grown-up to to begin exploring the map with a kid.

Production

We discussed every design detail together, collaborating especially closely on color. Robert led the cartography, handling datasets, transformation, and projection. RJ led illustration.

Afterward, we made the below diagram to capture the cascade of tools, exports, and processes necessary to create our map. In practice, this flow emerged organically over several months and was never run all at once.

Both Bay-Area residents, we are lucky to have collaborated on this several times in person, reviewing print samples along the way. We also negotiated dozens of hiccups and decisions over iMessage. This particular exchange represents an ideal of creative collaboration: positive enthusiasm while engaging with the nitty-gritty.

Is the design a success? Adults who’ve seen it in person say it’s beautiful.

But the real test is in front of a child, unrolled on the kitchen table, hung in a bedroom, or stuck on the fridge. Does it catch their attention? Does it prompt a question? Does it spark their understanding and imagination?

As we write this, the first Earth Biomes posters are on their way to kids across the globe.

If you’d like to put the living planet at arm’s reach in your own home, and see how it performs in your own ecosystem, you can order one here:

Order Earth Biomes

About

Chartography is by RJ Andrews and the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust.

Robert Simmon is a cartographer and science communicator who specializes in visualizing satellite imagery. His work work has appeared on the front page of the New York Times and the cover of National Geographic. He is also known for creating the first global view of the Earth at Night, and crafting the Blue Marble featured on the original Apple iPhone. See his work at RobertSimmon.com.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

This is my favorite time of year: I get to send beautiful information graphics all over the world (over 60 countries and counting!).

This holiday season, I’m joyfully celebrating the new edition of Info We Trust, the launch of MAPS FOR KIDSS—and doing something I’ve never done before:

• the biggest discounts on books and prints

• two very limited bundles

• AND Visionary Press is giving free domestic (USA) shipping on everything.

Shop Visionary Press Holiday Deals

2025 has been an extraordinary year for Visionary Press.

Earlier this year I released Info We Trust, Remastered with events in San Francisco and New York. It’s a rebuilt edition of my book about the craft and value of data graphics. The text is totally rewritten, many illustrations are redrawn, and the whole object is a big upgrade: printing and binding that combine to a beautiful-to-hold package. This is where I’ve poured everything I know.

MAPS FOR KIDS, the new poster series, starts from a simple belief: almost anything can be treated as a map. The first three posters are now in the shop—Earth Biomes, Food Energy, and Steam Locomotive—each a big, richly illustrated explanation designed to be enjoyed by kids and the grown-ups reading with them. 

They make wonderful gifts.

One thing I’ve noticed is that every few weeks someone orders “one of everything” from Visionary Press. It’s one of the biggest votes of confidence I can get. Inspired by these enthusiasts, I’ve created two limited holiday bundles:

Visionary Press Library: four books that map the landscape of information graphics.
– Info We Trust (Remastered)
– The three Information Graphic Visionaries volumes

Visionary Press Collection: A full bounty of information graphics:
– 4 books (the full Visionary Press Library)
– 3 MAPS FOR KIDS posters
– 2 large foldout prints: Cross-Sections Through California and Neil & Buzz

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to add these to your studio, classroom, or a kid’s bedroom wall, this is it. The discounts are real, quantities of the full collection are very limited (only a dozen!), and every order ships free within the U.S.

Shop Visionary Press Holiday Deals

Thank you for helping me put thoughtful and delightful information graphics into the world.

Onward!—RJ

About

Chartography is by RJ Andrews and the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

MAPS FOR KIDS is here.

Over the past year you’ve watched this project take shape: early topic lists, logo sketches, research trips, Ben-Day experiments, naked diagrams waiting for labels. Today the first three finished wall maps are real objects in the world—ink on thick Japanese matte paper—and you can finally order them from Visionary Press.

Shop Maps For Kids Posters

Maps for Kids starts from a simple idea: almost anything can be treated as a map. Geographic projections, statistical charts, and pictorial diagrams are all ways of flattening the world so we can see and understand better.

But the real magic happens when we enjoy those maps together. Each design is meant to be enjoyed side by side—loaded with kid-sized points of engagement and quiet cues for parents, big siblings, and teachers to help narrate what’s going on.

Let’s meet our three maps.

1. Food Energy

A chart about how everyday foods power our bodies.

Food Energy arranges familiar snacks and ingredients into a colorful wall chart. 146 foundation foods are placed by how much of their energy comes from fats, proteins, or carbohydrates, so kids can literally see the difference between an avocado, a yogurt, and a bowl of rice.

Learn what each macronutrient does — quick energy, steady energy, growth energy. A small inset focuses on carbohydrate-rich foods and shows which ones get most of their energy from sugars. The result is a poster that works as both a kitchen conversation starter and a gentle statistics lesson. Kids compare what they love (and don’t love) to eat while grownups finally have a map to all the foods they’ve eaten their whole life.

Hang it on the fridge, in a classroom, or anywhere people enjoy food.

2. Earth Biomes

A portrait of the living planet at arm’s length.

“Earth Biomes” is an illustrated wall map built from three globes. They line up so continents continue across them, with the bottom globe flipped to reveal the South Pole. Color washes across the land to mark major biomes—rainforests, deserts, tundras, and more—while ocean blues darken to show where the water runs deep.

This design is a collaboration with Robert Simmon, earth-visualizer extraordinaire.

A legend of plant silhouettes and tiny “recipes” of thermometers and raindrops shows how temperature and rainfall combine to shape each landscape. As kids explore, patterns snap into place: green belts hugging the equator, deserts hiding in mountain rain shadows, icy crowns at the poles. It’s an invitation to see Earth not just as “land and water,” but as a set of living systems.

I’ve shown its test prints to many people and each one had the same reaction: That’s beautiful!

3. Steam Locomotive

A diagram that shows how heat turns into motion.

“Steam Locomotive” tells the story of a classic wood-burning 4-4-0 engine—the kind that helped stitch the United States together in the 19th century. The engine stretches across the page like a mechanical animal, every major system illustrated and explained.

A short guiding narrative walks you from the tender full of wood and water, into the firebox and boiler, up to the steam dome, and finally down to the piston and driving wheels that pull the train forward. Around that journey spot extra details: the whistle that sings with steam, sand that helps slipping wheels grip the rails, and a tall smokestack that catches sparks before they set the prairie on fire.

After using it to explain how a train works to my 3-year-old, I was startled to find him soon drawing cutaway diagrams of steamies, revealing their firebox and boiler tubes inside.

How to get them

• Buy a single poster for $45

• Or get all three for $99

The three-poster package is a balanced introduction to information graphics: one diagram, one chart, one map. Steam, snacks, and the whole planet—a tiny gallery of how we can map different kinds of knowledge.

$45 Choose One

$99 three-poster set

What they’re printed on

These are not flimsy handouts.

Each poster is printed on thick, Japanese-made matte art paper—the kind that feels substantial in your hands and doesn’t glare under bright lights. Colors are crisp, so fine labels and little details pop.

Posters are rolled in protective tissue and shipped in a triangular carton, which means they arrive ready to gift: no creases and no tube wrestling

Behind the scenes, an international network of printers produces the posters close to where you live. That reduces shipping distance and customs friction, so your order tends to arrive faster (and cheaper) than if everything had to travel from California.

For everyone in the United States, Visionary Press is offering free domestic shipping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Who these are for

• Kids who ask “How does that work?” and “What’s that called?”

• Grown-up enthusiasts for inspiring design

• Folks like teachers, librarians, and pediatricians looking for visual explanations that respect kids’ intelligence

• Everyone hunting for a holiday gift that isn’t another plastic thing with batteries

I appreciate you following my year-long series chronicling this passion project. Thank you for cheering Maps For Kids along while it was still wobbly. This is the moment when the sketches and stories turn into artifacts you can actually unroll, hang, and enjoy.

Order Maps For Kids

I’m excited to finally send these maps out into the world—and onto the walls of the kids (and kids at heart) in your life.

Onward!—RJ

About

Chartography is by RJ Andrews and the newsletter of Visionary Press and Info We Trust.

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

On a Sunday in May 1842, the world’s faith in progress went up in flames outside Paris.

A special excursion train was returning from the King’s annual fête at Versailles. The train—two engines followed by seventeen wooden carriages—was packed with nearly 800 partiers.

Near Bellevue, a locomotive axle snapped on the descent to the city. The iron horse pitched over the rails, the boilers ruptured, and the front passenger cars jackknifed.

In moments the wreck became a furnace.

It gets worse. The car doors had been sealed—perhaps to prevent fare-dodgers hitching a free ride, perhaps to prevent passengers from injuring themselves while the train was in motion. After the crash, some passengers escaped through the windows. Others, injured or pinned in the wreckage, were unable to move. Trapped inside, they burned alive. Their screams haunt several eyewitness accounts.

More than fifty people died, including Antarctic explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville and his family. The Versailles-railway catastrophe was not just a mechanical failure, and not just the deadliest railway accident ever. It was an early reckoning with the speed and scale of industrial life. The accident revealed how thin the line was between harnessing energy and being consumed by it.

Could the speed of progress be tamed?

In the months that followed, engineers picked through the twisted metal to analyze what had gone wrong. One of those engineers was Jules Petiet.

Petiet’s Diagram

Next spring, Jules Petiet’s technical analysis of the accident appeared in Journal des chemins de fer (5 June 1843).

Petiet was an impressive fellow. He would soon be Chief Engineer of the Chemins de fer du Nord [Northern Railway Company]. He then designed locomotives before leading the prestigious engineering school École Centrale Paris. Petiet’s name is one of 72 inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.

Around the same time as his analysis came out, Petiet also published a new type of diagram that promised to help avert future rail disasters. Tracé géométrique de la marche et de la composition des trains (“Geometric layout of train movement and composition”).

Petiet charted movement over time, showing train paths snaking down stations across the course of the day. His diagram may be lost to history, but a contemporary description detailed that it also encoded the importance of each train, as measured by number of carriages, in the train’s line thickness.

Descendants of Petiet’s time-distance map are still created today. See a modern Caltrain example below.

Each red or blue string represents a train, some move up the train-line and some move opposite, down. Circles highlight where red express trains overtake blue local trains. The diagram helps identify pathing conflicts (string intersections), train speeds (string slopes), and station dwell times (horizontal strings).

To our passenger’s eye, the Caltrain diagram is a fascinating novelty. Curious, but not as helpful to catch a train as a simple timetable. Petiet’s diagram, however, was not invented for passengers.

Ibry’s Diagram

Petiet’s original graphic method was immediately put into use by Jacques Alphonse Busche on northern railway lines. It was also picked up by Charles Ibry, deputy chief operating officer of the railway from Paris to Rouen. (On some documents, Ibry is spelled Ybry.)

In 1847, as part of a promotion blitz to deploy the design cross-country, Ibry presented the design system to the Minister of Public Works. Its summary report included the following plate showing the Paris-Rouen line.

Like the Caltrain diagram, stations go down the page and time goes across it. Notice the criss-crossing trains, land elevation to the left of the station names, and dark horizontal bands.

The dark horizontal bands represent tunnels. For example, the top band occurs just above Bonnières. It’s the 2,600m (1.6 miles) Tunnel de Rolleboise, which opened in 1843. You can see it on this period map of the Paris-Rouen line as a dashed line.

The other feature of this plate is its skeuomorphic angled ruler. It is an astonishingly instructive detail. In 2019, design historian Sandra Rendgen gushed for Ibry’s machine (emphasis hers):

what is MOST EXCITING is that the article features a graphic showing a hardware instrument for plotting the schedules– this piece does not simply show a diagram, it shows a board with a flexible ruler screwed onto a little plate which can glide along the bottom of the diagram. By adapting the angle of the ruler, the engineers were able to schedule an individual speed for each train. This chart is absolutely unique – it makes us understand that these charts were not just meant to display a pre-conceived schedule—no! The charts and the instrument were actually used to set up the schedule in the first place.

The speed-indicating needle (H) at the bottom of the sliding ruler (B’) is geared (DEF) to turn with the ruler’s angle. This enabled an engineer to fix the ruler’s slope to a particular speed and then plot the train’s path.

Look at the slope from the elevation plan, and schedule the train’s speed accordingly. This graphic method does not just visualize schedules. It made the schedules.

Ibry’s 1847 campaign was a success. Railway diagrams swept the contintent, and were then expanded to other modes of transportation such as omnibus.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds two early blank diagrams, one with Ibry’s name on the bottom. They are labeled with the diagram’s name: RÉGULATEUR DES CHEMINS DE FER. Railway regulator. These extant templates are still waiting to be inserted into the machine and have their trains plotted.

Decades later, Léon Lalanne reflected that there wasn’t a single railway timetable that is not the numerical translation of graphical constructions “previously designed to ensure, for a fixed number of trains determined a priori, the most economical, safest, and most advantageous operation for both passenger and freight service.”

Marey’s Diagram

Étienne-Jules Marey honored Ibry’s diagram by including it in his La Méthode Graphique (1878, 1885), which I recently translated with Georges Hattab (Visionary Press).

Marey’s cartoon rendition kept station names and time of day but left off the elevation plan. (He also [mis]attributes the invention to Ibry.) Marey admired that “the line corresponding to each train expresses: departure and arrival times, relative and absolute train speeds, time of passage at each station, and duration of stops.”

By the time Edward Tufte used Marey’s graphic for the cover of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), it was completely detached from historic context. On Tufte’s cover, station names and times are absent. Inside, Tufte credits only Marey. The Versailles wreck, Petiet’s origin, Ibry’s promotion, and everything else was forgotten. The chart had become pretty furniture—a billboard for the book that introduced a generation to data graphics.

To recount:
1843 — Petiet charts it.
1847 — Ibry mechanizes it.
1878 — Marey abstracts it.
1983 — Tufte immortalizes it.

Howard G. Funkhouser included Ibry’s campaign in “Historical development of the graphical representation of statistical data” (1937), referencing the 1847 report. That’s how I knew it existed, and how I found and purchased the volume containing that remarkable plate showing Ibry’s machine in action.

Research, guided by a sense that an extraordinary thing might be out there, is a pillar of rare works collecting. It’s one of its joys. In a way, this essay is a tidy version of what went through my mind as I hunted for that early graphic. (Not included: my many dead ends.) I am interested in sharing more about collecting and understanding old charts.

I am also interested in how data graphics come to be. They are born mostly from necessity—too often from horrific necessity. Time and again, charts have helped us claw our way out of disaster. From tragedy, a data graphic of modern transport was born. How many lives did it save? We thankfully will never know.

Onward!—RJ

About

RJ Andrews is obsessed with data graphics. He helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Attila Bátorfy: Do you remember when and why, or perhaps who, sparked your interest in the history of data graphics?

RJ Andrews: I’m the son of two history nuts (and collectors). Nearly every vacation was to a museum, often to go behind the scenes with curators into collections. In September 2016, I visited Tableau in Seattle to give a talk to their research staff. Afterward, I went for a walk with Ben Jones, leader of Tableau Public at the time, around Gas Works Park. Ben encouraged me to look into the history of data visualization, observing that no one from my generation had a good handle on it. The following fifteen months was my swift turn into historic graphics. Ben’s prompt led me to create my Ogilby timeline, which is mostly inspired by Michael Friendly’s Milestones project. The project was my first attempt at understanding our tradition. Its original poster got a lot of attention, which encouraged me to turn it into an interactive and keep digging into historic charts.

In July 2017 I pitched a publisher on a book about the history of charts titled Conveyed; how data revealed the world. They didn’t spring for that concept, instead funding the original edition of Info We Trust.

That autumn, I attended the first Ruderman Conference at Stanford’s David Rumsey Map Center. There, David Rumsey introduced himself to me, citing his enthusiasm for the Ogilby project. He confided that he was turning his attention toward collecting historic data graphics and invited me to his house to see his collection.

There, in November 2017, he told me that I was about to start collecting. He was right. The following month, inspired by encountering real works in David’s collection, I made a batch of facsimile linen-back case maps as Christmas presents for information-graphic friends. My accompanying card neatly summarized the past year’s journey:

Enclosed please find a handmade and to-scale facsimile of Darton & Gardner’s Comparative Heights of the Principal Mountains and Lengths of the Principal Rivers. The famous and earliest known rivers-and-mountains type graphic, it launched decades of similar charts. The 1823 original was produced as a “case map”: fixed to a linen backing & contained within a cardboard sleeve. When I first saw one of the rare existing originals in person I was amazed at how small it was and thought you might be delighted with a similar experience! It is packed with whimsy and design flourishes that are sure to inspire. 2017 has been a wonderful year of learning for me and I am so thankful that you have been part of the adventure.

Looking back, this was obviously a specter of my future publishing endeavour, Visionary Press.

What do you think is the reason for that the history of data graphics/information graphics became popular in the past decade?

It doesn’t feel popular to me. Any rise in the past decade may be due to newly digitized archives, data journalism’s rise bringing attention to the field, plus a now-extinct vibrant international community on Twitter.

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Which period do you find the most exciting and interesting?

Works surrounding the first world war appeal to me. Before the Great War you had the zenith of print culture and empire powers, plus the rapid rise of statistical science. This combination produced monumental achievements, including lavish American and French statistical atlases. After the Great War, prior achievements diffused to new places where they were spun around with fresh visual approaches to voice strongly persuasive arguments, or propaganda across the world. My prior example would be Scaife’s Civil War, and later examples are the Istanbul Journal of Justice and the Isotype Institute.

How does the inspiration you draw from old data graphics appear in your information design work?

The history of data graphics teaches us two essential things. When we make data graphics we are part of a proud tradition of people all over the world and all over society who worked hard to better discern reality and create shared understanding. It’s never been easy, but it’s often inspiring and mostly worthwhile. Studying information-design history also teaches us more ways to solve information problems. Like us, our predecessors faced all sorts of information problems. The solutions they naturally arrived at are often different from how we would solve things. This is because they existed with different contexts: analog workflows, big canvases with high resolutions, large creative teams, different data, and different narrative pressures.

If you look at the literature on history to date, do you have any general observations about the works?

My Information Graphic Visionaries book series put forward the kind of history I am interested in: one that gets into the details about what, how, and why masterpieces are made. We are ready to move past histories that are too superficial, especially long lists without connective tissue between important works. I also have a sense that no one has struck the right geographic balance in their telling. Previous histories are too western-centric, true. They didn’t properly acknowledge universal and ancient aspects of information graphics. But modern tellings reach for some fantasy where the bar chart, and other artifacts of statistical science’s development, is as old as time and equally distributed everywhere. And that’s just not how it happened. These are tools that were invented and developed by a relatively small number of people—adopted, adapted, and improved over time. That story is interesting to me.

Are there any data graphics that you specifically discovered and introduced to the public? Please tell us about them!

I noticed, researched, and collected Frances Lightfoot’s colossal chronographer. I am also the first to organize the catalog of Florence Nightingale’s graphics.

Have you ever thought about what will happen to your collection when you are no longer around?

I’ve assembled a collection of data graphics that I consider a working reference design library—a resource for me and others to help us make great work. It’s a great joy to host tours and expose people to great works. I have an original Minard design treatise from 1861 that is quite precious. It inspired me to translate its accompanying text. There are logical ends for any collection. It can be sold for parts, transferred to an institution for preservation, or passed on to an heir (Or some combination.). I began collecting at a relatively young age, and believe I still have some time to figure things out!

What was the reception of the first three volumes of Visionary?

Beautiful books are very important to me. Like others before me (Nightingale, Brinton, Tufte), I embarked on a financially foolish endeavour to make beautiful data-graphic books. I wish I didn’t have to and that a traditional publisher would do it for me. Let me know if you are that publisher and can take over the burden! Making nice books is really hard. Reception and enthusiasm was enough to put the project into production, but not enough to sell out our print run. Get your books before they sell out. I don’t expect to ever be able to reprint these at such a phenomenal quality.

Do you have any new book plans for the Visionary series?

I’m working on a poster series titled Maps for Kids inspired by classic Marie Neurath books. It takes the perspective that everything is a map. We will launch with a map of an American steam locomotive, a map of Earth biomes, and a map of macronutrient energy composition across two hundred basic foods. I want to use this series to develop beautiful pictorial diagrams, statistical charts, and geographic maps.

The five greatest data graphics and/or creators of all time? One cannot be American, German, French, or British!

Acknowledging that these dudes often, or mostly had other people actually produce their designs, my top five today are: Halley, Playfair, Humboldt, Walker, and the Neuraths. Each developed several novel information graphics with lasting impact. And, Neurath was Austrian, not German ;)

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About

RJ Andrews helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

I’m designing a Maps for Kids poster that plots 200 foods by macronutrient composition. Each mark is a tiny picture—so I need hundreds of symbols that read at small sizes, keep stylistic cohesion, and still feel exciting.

Here’s my hand-to-digital system that makes that possible.

Style Inspiration

Isotype is my primary reference for Maps for Kids. Their symbol style, crafted by Gerd Arntz, features hand-cut silhouettes—bold, chunky masses with nicks, wobble, and tiny printing artifacts that give them a tactile feel. Proportions are slightly volumetric, in profile or ¾ view.

Here’s a selection of Isotype and Isotype-inspired food icons from around the 1930s I assembled as reference:

Compared to modern Noun Project-style icons, Isotype is less sterile and less geometric, with varied line weights, irregular edges, and specific, narrative detail that conveys materiality and category at a glance.

Design Constraints

I’m not trying to imitate Isotype pictographs exactly. My needs and goals are a little different:

1. Show hundreds of different symbols at once (Isotype only used a few in one composition)

2. Each symbol is printed relatively small

3. Each symbol can have more than one color to help differentiate them and make the poster more exciting

The Isotype qualities I aspire to are roughness, handmade feel, and occasional ¾-perspective.

Workflow

After attempting a digital-only workflow, I developed a process that originates with pencil sketches, continues with marker fills, and then proceeds to Photoshop to separate and clean color layers before choosing specific colors. The easy trick to get a handmade feel continues to be … make it by hand.

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Here’s what the progress looks like for my watermelon symbol:

But a single symbol isn’t enough.

I need to do this for hundreds of foods in a way that maintains style while also differentiating each food. (Yeah, I briefly tried to use AI to do this. It couldn’t. I also considered stock image libraries.)

Here are the first pencil sketches. Each was made while looking at “studio lighting” photography of real food.

Below are the marker fills for the same illustrations.

You can see early attempts with blue and gray markers on the first page. I quickly learned that black-red-yellow markers separate nicely and stuck with them for the rest.

The marker fills are rough and full of wobbly lines. In a word, human. Perfect!

These illustrations are the primary ingredient to my digital workflow. But I’m not publishing a red asparagus—my icons need another ingredient: color.

Color System

Isotype symbols rarely had more than one color. Marie Neurath described in Instructural Science 3 (1974):

Colours are also part of the visual language. Their meaning is often traditional, but often we had to introduce our own traditions. We tried not to use too many colours with too many meanings, as pictures should be read easily and also remembered if possible; too many colours would confuse. … We tried to adhere more and more to the rule that even in black and white a chart could still make sense.

I developed a color palette based on historic Isotype colors. Its swatches are below: Columns are hue families; rows are value from dark (top) to light (bottom). Background swatch approximates the poster’s field.

Why so many greens? I need several options to help detail all the leafy vegetables.

Having a consistent color palette helps me move quickly—I never have to think about which red I should use. It also helps the overall composition hang together because all of the icons are colorfully associated.

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Coloring is done with masked color fill layers in Photoshop. This let’s me quickly eyedrop colors from my palette. Notice the layered use of masks.

Photoshop detail: I made fill layers from the scanned marker illustrations by: selecting color range, and then modifying selection with smooth (2px), expand (2px), and adjust levels to get rid of any color ghosts.

Toolchain

The color palette is a living document (Illustrator) that live links to the icons (Photoshop) which live links to the poster composition (InDesign). Here’s what my system looks like:

And here are the icons so far. Not quite 200, but we are getting there!

I’m developing these as quickly as I know how, and it still feels slow. Perhaps not artistically slow, but economically slow.

Is this level of effort worth it? Looking forward it hardly ever does. It seems like there’s a waterfall of content out there more quickly produced that will garner much more attention. But looking backward at a dozen years of nifty projects, I’m glad I always put in the work.

Critique

Seen together, I spot a few symbols that may need more love: that spinach leaf needs a second color, I don’t like the heavy lines on the juice box, the onion needs another try.

But overall I’m pleased with the result. It’s not Isotype, it’s its own thing. And that’s good.

The symbols also do not have to do all the lifting: on the composition, the icons will be accompanied by labels too. I’m still playing with label size and color.

I’m also considering distinguishing the labels for any foods that get more than half their energy from a special carbohydrate: sugar. Perhaps by changing their label’s color?

By now, you may have noticed that my symbols lack protein and fat. That’s because they are nearly all carb-heavy foods. Let’s see how they all look laid out on the carbohydrate corner of the ternary diagram.

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I’m struggling to make a new color palette for a project.

So I built a small tool based on how I think about color design: Color can be engineered in a repeatable way that clarifies messy choices.

Color is hard

A simple way to understand meaning is as a game of difference. We don’t care as much about absolute values as we do relative contrasts. Young and old, rich and poor, kind and cruel. Things often matter because we compare them to something else.

Knowledge deserving more emphasis in your brain gets more graphic emphasis on my canvas, often by marrying semantic contrast with graphic contrast. Left and right, big and small, light and dark.

Color is a magical phenomenon. Its properties beautifully match our need to differentiate information. From the color chapter in Info We Trust Remastered (Visionary Press, $39):

Distinct colors draw our attention because we perceive color according to difference. From a survival perspective, colors are most relevant in relation to their environment. Over the course of a day, the quality of light is changing as the sun moves through the sky—both in brightness and in color—but we seldom perceive this. Our pupils physically adapt to the changes in lighting by contracting in bright conditions and dilating when it is dim. Meanwhile, other parts of our visual system compensate for the shift from yellow-white light when the sun is high above to the orange and red light when the sun is low on the horizon. . . .

Imagine you are hunting for ripe red apples among a green expanse of leaves. To contrast the red color of desire against other environmental cues, our eyes and brains adjust to changing conditions. This adaptation lets us hunt for fruit at noon and dusk, on an open plain or in a forest. We change to make effective comparisons across various lighting conditions.

Color’s interdependent nature also makes it hard to nail the right color palette. Sometimes I find the right mix intuitively, almost artistically. Other times I turn to a more mechanical method that anchors on the idea of using color’s ability to differentiate, contrast, and emphasize.

Two things to know

There are lots of ways to model color. A popular method comes stock with digital design tools, HSB: Hue accounts for named colors around the color wheel. Saturation is color intensity or strength—how far away something is from gray. Brightness is related to how dark or light a color looks. (This luminance dimension is sometimes presented as lightness or value.)

For example, for a fixed blue hue, see how color changes as brightness increases upwards and saturation increases rightward. Try starting with the center dot, and move your eyes up (brighter) or down (darker) or left (more gray) or right (more vivid). Then, look at the corners to see combinations (e.g. upper right corner is brighter and more saturated).

If colors are to help us differentiate information, they must be well-differentiated.

What’s curious about color is that brightness is generally a stronger differentiator than hue or saturation. This has physiological roots in our visual system: we are wired to notice light–dark edges first. Equal-brightness hues tend to fuse at small sizes or in the periphery. Even a modest step in brightness separates marks cleanly.

Designing with brightness first is also more resilient to color deficiencies, which may cause confusion between two colors distinguished only by hue.

Color is a lifetime study; but for information design, two points can do the lion’s share of the work: (1) Color can be broken into three dimensions. (2) Color’s brightness dimension is the most useful to differentiate.

Brightness → hue → saturation

This sequence reflects how color can help differentiate and emphasize information:

• First, set brightness levels. The color that deserves the most emphasis gets the highest contrast compared to the background color. Colors that should be well-differentiated should have different levels of brightness. Aim for at least 10 points in your tool’s brightness/value scale between neighbors; thin lines or small labels may need more.

• Next, choose your hues. Beware semantic opportunities (water is blue) and traps (red may not be best for positive connotation).

• Finally, adjust saturation. This step achieves aesthetic coherence—it helps everything hang together.

Let’s explore this method by analyzing some of the colors in the below map detail of Takamatsu’s public transit by Jug Cerovic.

I used my eye dropper tool and found the numerical value of brightness, saturation, and hue. Then I plotted them together:

There are two groups of colors: transit-line marks and basemap. The groups are differentiated from each other by both brightness and saturation dimensions: see how each group exists in their own vertical bands of brightness and saturation, which I’ve highlighted with yellow and gray background fills.

Brightness and saturation distinguish each group. Then, inside either group, colors are differentiated by hue. See how each color owns a unique part of its hue circle.

The first time I made this color-deconstruction plot, a lot of the mercurial aspects of color snapped into mechanical focus. It also helps me explain color design to others. (This approach originated once upon a time when a client begged for a technical explanation of how a proposed palette worked.)

Extracting color dimensions, plotting their values, and iterating design is a pretty clunky workflow. Since my first plot, I’ve only reached for it to teach color design and when I’m in a real pickle. Until now.

Color tooling in practice

I made a simple color tool that plots swatches, their component dimensions, states their contrast ratio compared to the background color, and lets me adjust component values. Here it is analyzing the new NYC subway map. You can see a saturation distinction between background and transit groups. (Note that I’m using Value here instead of Brightness.)

The tool gives me a perspective on how color works. It’s also useful beyond analysis, for actual iterative creation. This method gives me hints on where to nudge colors toward more effective palettes. For example, here’s a horizontal bar chart that needs a strong hierarchy: a “hero” color (dark blue) that I want to distinguish from secondary and tertiary categories:

Analyzing the palette, I like that the hero color’s value (brightness) is far separate from the others (red circle). But the overall effect still has unwanted clash.

Diagnosis: Some color attributes may be too close. Background and 2nd blue have similar brightness value. Hero and 2nd blue share similar hue and saturation. Both are opportunities for further distinction.

Remedy: Chang the 2nd blue, dramatically altering its hue and saturation. Modify the 3rd color (gray) to put the brightness values and contrast ratios of the Hero-2nd-3rd sequence in the proper order. Here’s the palette remade addressing those unwanted neighbors:

To my eye, these colors have a stronger visual hierarchy. The overall effect is also better because the colors don’t compete as much for attention. It is more calm in a useful way.

You’re invited to play

Made in Google Sheets, this tool is super flexible. It can drag-and-drop rows, sort by brightness to spot near-neighbors, or add a new column that gives me the specific gap between neighboring brightness levels. (Under the hood it’s just a few HEX2DEC and DEC2HEX tricks.)

This tool is still a work in progress. Maybe someday it will evolve to something with a polished UI.

There is a link at the very bottom of the email for paying subscribers to play with the tool. Make a copy and have fun. Tell me where it soars and where it fails. (And if a paid subscription is too much of a burden for you right now, message me and I will get you access.)

Rolling your own tooling is fun. But you gotta build something with it! I still need that new color palette for my project.

Onward!—RJ

p.s. This is a companion to A Dangling Blue, my rant against cold inhuman design tools.

About

RJ Andrews helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.

RJ’s book, Info We Trust, is out now! He also published Information Graphic Visionaries, a book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators in 2022 with new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public.

Read more