#1 Truthpaste! Love This Labelling - Let's Roll It Out Across All Products
‘Information Is Beautiful’ is the brainchild of David McCandless. He is the author of three best-selling infographic books:
- Knowledge Is Beautiful: Impossible Ideas, Invisible Patterns, Hidden Connections - Visualized;
- The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia;
- 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.
#7 In The First Half Of The 20th Century, Tens Of Thousands Of People (Mostly Children) Suffered Paralysis From Polio. The First Vaccine Was Introduced In The USA In 1955
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.
#16 Love A Revealing Cut-Away! (From A London Transport Museum Poster By Gavin Dunn)
#17 Measurement Unit Differences Between The U.s.a. And Most Of The World
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:
- Who made the record? When did they make it and why?
- Was the source actually created at the same time as the event that’s described in it?
- Does the source have an agenda, and did they take part in the original event, or are they using secondhand info?
- Is the information logical? Does it make sense in the context of the people, places, and timeframe being researched?
#19 One 18 Inch Pizza Has 'More Pizza' Than 2 X 12 Inch Pizzas!
#20 Telling. Quantity Of Male Versus Female Dialogue In Best Picture Films Of Recent Decades
