TED talk review – data visualization and infographics

David McCandless – The Beauty of Data Visualization

Wonderful TED talk by David McCandles, and it hit several things that were really exciting for me. The first thing was the simplicity of his designs – it supports everything I’ve been reading in Reynold’s PresentationZen: Design book about simplicity and letting your audience focus on the speaker, and having the visuals support the speaker, not the other way around.

I’m continually surprised by what visuals can do. In an artistic sense, that’s easy to understand – a painting or photograph can tell a story – but a design? An infographic? And yet, that’s exactly what McCandless was emphasizing.

Essentially, we’ve been flooded with data and numbers, and we have huge amounts of it just lying around waiting for us to make sense of it. But we all know how difficult it is to make sense of huge amounts of numbers and words. That’s where the visuals come in and are crucial in allowing us to grasp things that otherwise are incomprehensible. It’s one thing saying that 12,000 people died in a natural disaster. But when compare that number to, say, a football stadium or something similar (I have no idea what holds 12,000 people), suddenly that’s easier to grasp.

I’m constantly in awe of how many new discoveries are just lying in wait, how many insightful connections between seemingly unrelated disciplines are out there, just waiting for the right person to take notice.

I’ve actually always loved data and graphs. I love trying to make sense of them numbers and understand what that means in concrete terms. In that sense, this TED talk opened up a possibility that maybe with graphic design I could do something similar to this – mine data and reduce it to comprehensible visuals. I would love to do that.

I was also heartened by his idea that by this point, we have all been made sensitive to design (hopefully good design), and thus have already a design literacy of sorts instilled in us. It’s certainly true that ever since deciding to purse graphic design, I’ve been much more aware of everything from commercials to pamphlets to logos and web design – what its purpose is, the typography, placement, color scheme, etc. I don’t fully understand it all, but I’m paying much more attention to it.

Highly recommend his video, if only for the accent 😉  Listen to how he says ‘data’.