RJ's Inspiration #007 🌊

RJ's Inspiration

weekly viz to inspire you too

👁 THE OCEAN SHRINKS
is one of 53 "pictorial charts" in the book Only An Ocean Between created by the Isotype Institute to display good British-American relations. It shows how the ocean has apparently shrank with faster transportation technology, from 1800 to 1838 to to-day (1940s, when the book was published).

I love how simple the chart and its styling appears, hitting you with the big idea that the world is getting smaller. The use of color is sublime. Then, take some time with it and you can see how the designers baked in all kinds of great detail: each wave represents a day of travel, the red vehicle stays red, but changes form. The city skylines grow (is that London with St. Paul's and Big Ben?). Yet these details do not distract from the big macro lesson! It is a timeless piece. See more examples of Isotype from this book here.

📖 INFO WE TRUST
This week hundreds of people visualized a word frequency dataset based on my book Info We Trust. Their results are fascinating and showed me a lot about my own work. You can take a look at many of them on Twitter.

👉 WHAT INSPIRES YOU?
Please contact me to share your favorite viz or offer any advice for how this newsletter experiment can be improved.