Janet McAllister: Art of making the complex simply beautiful

In Information is Beautiful, David McCandless shows that simplification doesn't mean dumbing down. Photo / Supplied

I am a writer but I admit, begrudgingly, that sometimes a picture paints 1000 words. Here's a comparison to illustrate (geddit?): adults in the US spend 200 billion hours a year watching television, whereas Wikipedia only took 100 million hours to create (as of last year). Startling - but when you read that were you able to compute that 100 million hours is only 1/2000th, or 0.05 per cent, of 200 billion?

Probably not, yet when we see one block of colour 2000 times larger than a neighbouring block of colour, our brains immediately take in the true, mind-boggling enormity of the comparison. This infographic actually exists, and as its creator, British information designer David McCandless, puts it: "The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns, shape and colour; it loves them, it calls them beautiful."

At their best, infographics use this eye sensitivity to feed us data in clear, easy-to-read ways. "Infographics" is a catchall term which covers graphics, graphs, maps and charts which display information in ways which do not rely solely on words. Such images have been around for millennia, but they are an increasingly sophisticated design speciality in their own right.

They are seen as an internet-friendly solution to an internet problem: information overload. They can pull together multiple pieces of data to tell underlying stories. Simplification does not have to mean "dumbing down".

For example, one of McCandless' most popular graphs on his "information is beautiful" website is the "billion dollar-o-gram", which shows the relative sizes of various billion dollar amounts: the eventual total estimated cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan; the global pharmaceutical market; African debt; and many other numbers, including the cost of the global financial crisis.

Also politically charged: in 2005 Portuguese magazine Revista Grande Reportagem turned national flags into infographical art by using the proportions of colour in each flag to represent national statistics on things like child labour, drug trafficking or attitudes to war. For example, the green background of the Brazilian flag was shown to represent the proportion of the population who live on less than $10 a month.

Information might be beautiful, but misinformation is dangerous, and the trustworthiness of each infographic relies on both its data source and its design. It also pays to ask: what is being left out?

Meanwhile, interactive infographics are fun for all the family. A cell size and scale graphic on the University of Utah Genetic Science Learning Centre's website allows you to zoom from a coffee bean to a carbon atom. Also online, Nikon's "Universcale" uses the same idea, but starts far smaller and increases to billions of light years.

Auckland graphic designer Gareth Parry is trying to create 52 infographics in 52 weeks, on everything from fruit to NZ Government budgets to his own club cricket statistics. His blog charts his lessons learned, and is a cheery, fascinating insight into the amount of work that goes into creating simple elegance. It sounds exhausting; I'll stick with writing. See informationisbeautiful.net