David McCandless

A writer, designer, and creative director.

This week in IXD104 we started learning about infographics and visualising data. One of the artists that Paul suggested we look into more was David McCandless.

McCandless is a journalist turned designer, who wrote the book “Information is Beautiful”, and also founded a website under the same name to showcase his passion for data visualisation. The team on the site frequently update and revise the data shown in each infographic thats uploaded.

Upon first glance at the website, I thought the thumbnails and infographic titles were very interesting, and I was immediately drawn to click on quite a few and have a closer look.

One that really caught my eye was one comparing the views and lives of those whose political stance is in the left vs those in the right. I really liked how this infographic was designed and I thought it was very done very cleverly. I found the illustrations to be very nice and minimalistic, which is good because they don’t take away from the data and the point that is being made. I also really like how McCandless made such smart use of colour, and layout that coincides really well with both sides.

Another one of his infographics that stuck out to me was about meat and foodstuffs, and whether they are kosher, halal, both or neither. The thing I liked most about this infographic, apart from the beautiful illustrations, was the use of humour. The way McCandless ranked each item of food in order of “tastiness” was very funny to me, and it makes the infographic a lot more unique and interesting. I think this technique is something to consider perhaps in my own infographic as it can make the information even more enjoyable to digest.

The third and final one of David McCandless pieces that I will talk about is one he did comparing the scale of devastation caused by natural disasters over the years.  The first thing I noticed about this infographic was how he had categorised each natural disaster by a colour that seemed to match. For example, black for oil spills and blue for floods.

I also personally really like how clearly this data is laid out, and how easy it is to understand just by comparing the size of each square and also by looking at the colours. Although my infographic will likely be a lot “busier” per se, with lots of illustration and different visuals, I still thought this piece was quite interesting and unique in how simplistic and clean it is.