This book is my personal crown juwel: Infographics are abundant today, but few people know they have been around for centuries. They have always worked as a tool for understanding. And they have been used to explain every possible topic from cosmos to religion, from diseases to market prices. In this beautiful book, I have assembled an enormous collection from the past 800 years. Available from TASCHEN in three languages
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This was a thrilling discovery tour: “Napoleon’s Russian Campaign” (1869) is one of the most famous infographics ever. The man who created it was Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), a little known French civil engineer who immersed himself into the new art of data visualisation when he was already 70 years old. He created a wonderful series of data maps, which was largely unknown to the public until recently. In this book, I have published the full series of maps for the first time, ever
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Understanding time as a linear vector feels natural today, but it is the result of a long tradition of graphic “time maps”. One crucial innovation was the “Chronographie”, an enormous historical map published in France in 1753. A new book tells us everything about it
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Will Burtin (1908-1972) was a German graphic designer working in the US, whose work fuses influences from Bauhaus to Buckminster Fuller. He was also a brilliant conceptual thinker, who used visualisation to explain complex scientific issues. This book provides a detailed introduction to his work
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Punch cards were used as data storage for early computers. Their graphic design is optimized for the machines that processed them – but also for the humans who were involved in the process. This created a very curious mix of styles. For the book “Print Punch” I wrote a chapter about this graphic design oddity
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One of my favorite collaborations: An urban installation in the city of Breda that made the history of infographics tangible, in the truest sense of the word. Together with the Graphic Design festival Breda and Dutch illustrator Jan Hamstra
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Bar charts are everywhere today. Back around 1800, they came as a complicated visual that required abstract thinking. Was it the recording of flood levels that inspired them?
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Digital archives are great to have, but hard to experience. This interactive installation lets us look at the daily work of über-artist Leonardo da Vinci, via one of his famous collections of drawings
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Like many authors, German novelist Theodor Fontane was a voracious reader — and he loved to annotate his books. An interactive installation provides a glimpse into what he was after
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The Middle Ages are a remote world with a completely different media ecosystem. Books were custom-made, scarce and did take an enormous time to produce. This process left a lot of space for elaborate diagrams
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Researching the history of information graphics is a collective effort. I have been lucky to collaborate with some of the most prominent collectors and enablers in the field
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The early modern age in Europe was shaped by the advent of printing technologies — as well as by the colonization of large parts of the world. The infographics from the period provide testimony
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In the 19th century there was tremendous growth in the use of information graphics, such that by the end of the century a natural proliferation of maps and diagrams can be noted across many areas of media culture…
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