50 Awesome And Insightful Graphs, As Featured By The Team At ‘Information Is Beautiful’

‘Information Is Beautiful’ is the brainchild of David McCandless. He is the author of three best-selling infographic books:

1. Knowledge Is Beautiful: Impossible Ideas, Invisible Patterns, Hidden Connections - Visualized;
2. The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia;
3. And—most recently—Beautiful News: Positive Trends, Uplifting Stats, Creative Solutions.

The founder has also spoken at TED Global, as well as at 200+ conferences and events. What’s more, he runs the startup VizSweet, “a lovely artisan tool for creating beautiful interactive data visualisation.” McCandless, along with his dedicated team at ‘Information Is Beautiful,’ aims to explain, distill, and clarify data, information, and knowledge into beautiful and useful graphics and diagrams.

According to the team running the project, all of their visualizations are based on facts and data. They constantly update and revise them. McCandless and his team members actually mostly create their graphics by hand, using the Illustrator program (a personal favorite of some of us, too).

Meanwhile, many of the interactive data visualizations they make are actually created using their proprietary VizSweet software.

Something else that’s mindblowing is that the founder of the project, McCandless, actually made The Helicopter Game. It’s something that we’ve played and thoroughly enjoyed during breaks in between IT classes at school.

At the time of writing, the ‘Information Is Beautiful’ Facebook page boasts 531k followers from all over the globe. Meanwhile, 232k social media users follow the project on Instagram, while another 119k do so on X (formerly Twitter).

With so much information flooding our social media and news feeds daily, it’s impractical to double-check and cross-reference every single bit of info we stumble across.

So, it’s much more time-efficient to evaluate the reliability of the sources you come across. Although all sources, even the best ones, make mistakes, not all sources are equal.

Reliable sources do their best to get to the truth, link to the info they use, and make corrections whenever they slip up. On the flip side, bad sources care only about sensationalism, clicks, and moving whatever agenda they have further.

Basic media literacy and the ability to recognize (un)reliable sources are skills that absolutely everyone should have. In this day and age of scandalous headlines, intentional misinformation, polarization, biases, and AI slop, there are so many ways to misinterpret information and mix up fact with fiction.

A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is to always consider what the source you’re looking at might be hoping to accomplish, and what their intentions are. According to archival expert Margot Note, you should ask yourself the following questions when gauging the reliability of a source:

1. Who made the record? When did they make it and why?
2. Was the source actually created at the same time as the event that’s described in it?
3. Does the source have an agenda, and did they take part in the original event, or are they using secondhand info?
4. Is the information logical? Does it make sense in the context of the people, places, and timeframe being researched?

Broadly speaking, information that is overly sensational and plays on your emotions is likely to be misunderstood by the person, biased, or even outright wrong. If something sounds too good or bad to be true, it likely is.

Real life is rarely—if ever—black and white. It’s nuanced. It’s subtle. It’s full of shades of gray and complexities that can’t be explained away so easily.

According to the BBC, there are 3 main things to check for when you want to find out whether a source is reliable or not:

1. Check who made the claim. Dig into the person or organization’s background and previous work to see if it’s accurate and unbiased;
2. Check multiple sources to see what conclusions they come to. Having more sources report the same info increases the likelihood that a claim may be true;
3. Check for reliable evidence. Look at the information that the source is using to back up their claims.

“It’s also good to ask yourself if what the source is saying sounds believable. If it appears a bit out of this world or too good to be true, then the chances are that it might well be,” the BBC writes.

Are you big fans of interesting graphs and cool visual data design like we are, dear Pandas? Which of these graphics impressed you the most? What’s something new that you learned today, all thanks to these visuals? Do you typically prefer look at graphs or maps? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

So, if you have a moment, swing by the comments at the bottom of this post to share yours. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the ‘Information Is Beautiful’ site and socials for their latest awesome stuff!