'Billion Dollar-o-Gram'
I've mentioned in this blog my thoughts on how verbal language can distort reality whereas pictures cannot really lie - well David McCandless is a London-based 'data designer' who is very much on a mission to spell out the truth about date by turning it into pictures. It's astounding to see how he takes facts and figures that get thrown at us all the time and turns them into visual images which, at last, allow us mere humans to see the 'bigger picture'. It's crazy how many times you can hear sums like £500 billion spoken about in the news but they don't sink in until you actually see them - alongside others. And when you gaze at the contradictions (eg. estimated cost of war in Iraq versus actual cost - imagine comparing the size of an arm band with the size of a swimming pool?) you begin to wonder whether a lot of powerful, clever people take advantage of the fact that information without visuals is protected information.
I told you all here first....the picture world is the truth-telling world.
And how exciting that someone intelligent, eloquent and very computer savvy such as David McCandless realises this too.
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-true-size-of-africa/
