Serendipity35

Diagrams, data and information graphics are often used when complex elements are presented in magazines, non-fiction books, business reports, product packaging and newspapers.

It's an element of design in a course that I teach. I recently came upon a book called Data Flow - Visualising Information in Graphic Design that catalogs some very creative data visualizations, AKA infographics.

This is way beyond archetypical diagrams such as pie charts and histograms. (Though there is a donut chart.)

The book has manifold types of diagrams developed for use in particular applications. There are chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to my own favorites which are some really complex three-dimensional diagrams.

Data Flow is not a cheap book with all those illustrations. (I actually "checked it out" in that Library 2.0 - the cafe at a Barnes & Noble store.)

Some of the graphics bump up against being artwork. It's interesting that in many cases, the more abstract the information, the simpler the graphics, while the more concrete data sets often get the most sophisticated and intricate graphic representations. There's also a video from the publisher at the Gestalten.tv that features the book's co-editors, Nicolas Bourquin and Thibaud Tissot, talking about what they were trying to show about infographics by putting together this collection.