The man who created Information Is Beautiful and Knowledge Is Beautiful sees his role as ‘information design’ and data-journalism. He uses design to raise impact while meticulously retaining statistical rigour. To David “data is not the new oil, but the new soil.” In presentations he shows how to tell stories with big data sets by transforming them into simple diagrams that tease out previously unseen patterns and make powerful connections.
The author of Information is Beautiful, David McCandless describes himself as a data-journalist and information designer. The book is dedicated to pictorial representations of knowledge and data, using infographics to analyse the seeming insurmountable amount of data that surrounds us.
David began his career writing about video games, and also hacking into them. He’s also been a web editor, a comedy writer, a conceptual copywriter and written on programming. His work merges data and visual design, and he has had pieces exhibited at MOMA in New York and Tate Britain and the Wellcome Collection in London.
In speeches David shows how we can turn complex data sets into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Data is meaningless without context and David’s diagrams help us to understand numbers, find hidden patterns and draw conclusions.