from a to zi: information is beautiful, and Stefanie Posavec

There is a wonderful website dedicating to making information, well ... beautiful! Facts and figures, issues and ideas, knowledge and data, numbers and words, made into graphic goodness. Information is Beautiful is run by David McCandless, a london-based author, writer and designer. He is apparently into 'anything strange and interesting' and he loves pies ... but hates pie charts. Remember those hours spent at school inputting data and picking, from Microsoft PowerPoint, which charts will represent the data best? ... Not a fan. Also, PowerPoint is boring.

Lets not be overambitious and summarise the whole site into one blogpost. So, today, we look at London-based data artist (woah!), Stefanie Posavec. One of her featured work on Information is Beautiful is Literary Organism, a visualisation of the structure of Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Posavec meticulously studied and analysed the text ...

... and then divide the text, where chapters "bloom into paragraphs, sprout sentences, and spread out into words". But there's more -- they are colour coded according to key themes. Ohhhh if only it was made for Dickens' Great Expectations, HSC English would have been much easier and way more fun and pleasurable. Here is the result:

Looove! Oh, yeah, also, Posavec teamed up with Microsoft research ecologist and studied the 1876 text The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and the Blue Colour of the Sky by General AJ Pleasonton ... which was the basis the album concept, album name, lyrics of OK Go's third album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky. Conceptual art, unto thee I declare my eternal love.