Super Sundry, Vol. 1

Robotic arts, fancy circles, and the most terrifying graphs on the internet.

Welcome to Chartography: insights and delights from the world of data storytelling.

Today, we have a special 'super-sundry' issue, brimming with exceptional information-design that warrants your attention. Frankly, it’s a bit of an experiment. I hope you enjoy the parade of maps, charts, and diagrams (in lieu of my typical design essay). Let’s go!

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“Fun to look at”

Mathematician David Smith recently announced the discovery of a shape that can be tiled “aperiodically”—without any repeating pattern.

Cartographer Kenneth Field sped the shape into a binned data map “showing the Isostatic gravity anomaly for the contiguous U.S.”

Echoing the sentiments of Field’s colleague, cartographer Daniel Huffman, I find it 'fun to look at,' and that alone is satisfying. Field goes a step further, explaining how you too can create such a design. Join him behind the scenes at ESRI.

“The most terrifying graphs on the internet right now.”

Retired professor Eliot Jacobson recently told us that “everything is spiking at the same time”: Both ocean temperature and sea ice extent are displaying surprising and worrisome anomalies.

Jacobson brought the graphics to show what he is talking about. Below is his latest, showing a red 2023 sea surface temperature anomaly in the North Atlantic.

Jacobson’s charts, which garnered millions of views within just a few days, underscore the power of a well-designed graphic to draw attention to critical stories.

Historian Rutger Bregman calls them “the most terrifying graphs on the internet right now.” See more worrisome anomalies, beautifully charted, in Jacobson’s essay, “WTF is Happening? An Overview.”

Robotic arts

Reddit user u/nhciao posted a series of artistic (working!) QR codes, created using Stable Diffusion. This one is my favorite. See more of artistic QR codes at Reddit

The in-house design studio of Swiss chemical company Geigy was a pioneer of the international typographic style during the 1950s and 1960s.

Their geometric work screams power, cleanliness, and competence: industrial perfection. It’s difficult to make something so simple look so good.

In my own exploration of robotic arts, I spent an exciting morning working with ChatGPT and the Noteable plugin, attempting to style a bar chart. While I'm reticent to delve into the details—after all, hearing about someone else's prompts can be as riveting as listening to retellings of last night’s dreams—I believe this represents a glimpse into a future of data graphics.

Circular Creativity

Digital computing hardware and software are not designed for polar coordinates. That’s one reason we don’t see many circular charts these days.

But it wasn’t always so. The 19th century is still revealing interesting circle designs. Data visualization historians Howard Wainer, Michael Friendly, and Stephen Stigler recently put the following charts on my radar.

Luke Howard, famous for classifying clouds, published a series of charts advocating for the use of the barometer in Barometrographia (1847).

Each wheel compared barometric pressure to other meteorological phenomena like wind direction, moon phases, temperature events, and unique happenings such as the sighting of Aurora Borealis and the arrival of swallows.

I do not have a link to a complete Barometrographia. Until we do, see Luke Howard’s fabulously-colored related work, The Climate of London (1833) at the David Rumsey Map Collection.

François Balley published the below “roses” in 1863. Thematically, they remind us of seasonal charts by Guerry (1829). Pictorially, they they are similar to diagrams by William Farr and Florence Nightingale from the previous decade. Note that south is on top:

The Balley sheet seems to be the earliest known instance of the term “rose” jumping from cartographic “wind rose” to abstract chart. See his Météorologie et météorographie, pathogénie et nosographie atlas at the Internet Archive.

Info We Trust

We are working on the next edition of my book, Info We Trust: How to Inspire the World with Data. Most of you have never seen this book. It has been out of print too long.

I am tremendously proud of its hundreds of hand-drawn illustrations. To give a sense of its styling, here’s a loop through the many ways an arrow conveys meaning: movement, relationship, energy, flow.

My information design consulting practice is also humming. This week I am: (1) developing chart style guidelines for a global firm (2) sketching an explainer information graphic for a case study (3) executing exploratory data analysis of a truckload of financial data à la Ben Affleck in The Accountant, and (4) teaching a high-end communication arts classes.

I just loaded my about page with dozens of publications and institutions that have given me great buzz and collected my work over the years, I’d love to hear what you think of the redesign: About

Going forward

Did this 'super-sundry' issue delight? Is there something I overlooked? Would you like to see this format repeated in future issues? I welcome your feedback—please share your thoughts by replying directly or completing this survey.

Onward!—RJ

About

Data storyteller 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 recently published series, Information Graphic Visionaries, a new book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators. With new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public. His first book is Info We Trust, How to Inspire the World with Data.