Effective Graphics

History

Pictorial symbols preceded the written word as a form of universal communication, and despite the march of time and the development of complex alphabets, they continue to be an effective means of transmitting information, often working in concert with the written word.

The first books made it easier to store and retrieve information, but they also created an opportunity for the emergence of new forms of visual communications. Diagrams began appearing in manuscripts as early as the 9th century that illustrated philosophical belief systems and family trees. Drawings were also used to illustrate the first medical and botanical books.

The development of new scientific tools during the 16th and 17th centuries brought new, more accurate ways of visualizing information. The mariner's compass, the aneroid barometer, and the bubble level are examples of innovations that resulted in significant improvements in the accuracy of plotting topographic measurements and nautical charts.

Some graphic innovations were simply the result of finding novel ways to represent quantitative data. Statistical graphics, such as the familiar pie, bar, and line charts that are commonplace in today's popular media and scientific journals, first appeared in a book published in 1786 by a little-known Scottish writer and engineer named William Playfair. His Commercial and Political Atlas contained 44 charts that analyzed the changing fortunes of England's balance of trade.

In the 1920s, artists at the Vienna Museum of Social and Economic Studies established a style of creating information graphics to show comparisons in numbers and averages that relied on the use of stylized symbols. This system was designed to be readable to anyone regardless of language or culture, and artists dubbed the technique “ISOTYPE,” which stands for the International System of Typographic Picture Education.

With the advent of the Internet, many publications began producing online and print versions, and this presented challenges as well as opportunities for visual representation of information. Often, graphics produced for print had legibility problems when they were translated online because of their small type, and line art did not reproduce as well on the screen. As a result, publishers had to decide whether to create two versions of every graphic or opt not to reproduce a graphic that appeared in print in the online version.

Despite these new challenges, the new medium did allow for more experimentation with new forms of informational representation. Online informational graphics can incorporate animation and interactivity with users. One such site, Many Eyes, also lets users upload their own data sets and analyze them using up to 19 different visualization models.

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