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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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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The graphic train schedule based on a line grid (often falsely attributed to Étienne-Jules Marey) is an influential early visualization method for railway traffic. Here is everything you need to know about it. Ligne de Paris à Boulogne, 1852. Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France. Where do I know this from? Of course you’ve seen this…
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From the start of the 20th century the popularization of information graphics continued just as had been observed in the century previous. New contexts and uses for info graphics included illustrated magazines, popular science books…
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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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Timelines seem like such a „natural idea“ these days that we don’t even notice their ubiquity anymore. Timelines are a universal concept…
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The Earth is roughly four and a half billion years old. During most of that time—i.e. over the course of some four billion years—the geological and biological development on our planet happened unbelievably slow. How can we possibly form even a faint idea of this unimaginable process that is the history of the Earth?
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There is a very basic joy in roaming through atlases and in looking at maps. Atlases are rich collections of places, and if there is one thing they can do it is making you travel around the world, to places near and far…
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Visualising data on health and mortality has a most up-to-date ring to it, as if it had required the rise of big data and computational tools for something as intricate as visual health statistics to develop. Surprisingly, however, already the mid-19th century saw a huge upsurge…
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