#LWF11 – David McCandless, Author & Information Designer – Infographics & Data

David is the author of http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/.

Worked through some fantastic infographics from his site, go look at them now.  Better still see his TED talk:

Some interesting insights from using Google InSights to track search terms.  Great tool for use in the classroom.

Nice talk about needing to compare proportions rather than totals, in the concept of military spending.  Love the Maths of normalising figures for population.

Take data and use it as a lense to clarify your thinking.

Like Stephen Heppel’s learners David is self-taught in his technical skills using the likes of Youtube.

What happens when you make data beautiful?  Visualisation helps make the mind envisage scale and proportion far better.  Can condense a huge amount of info into a small amount of space.

Nice graphic of the difference between the Left & Right in American politics.  Helps you to see where someone else is coming from.

Information design is about solving information problems, something we have lots of now.

Fascinating and enlightening talk – a breath of fresh air after the intense debate from previous session.  And to top it off his book is on sale at Amazon!