visual data

These data visualizations, caricatures, and images capture the internet in all it's wiry glory.

Though we use it every day in countless ways, the Internet remains mostly faceless to us. Like a faint memory, we feel we know it intimately but have no sense of its size, its scale, or its design.

To give form to what we too prevalently consider a formless entity, we've rounded up some impressive attempts at capturing its likeness--from data visualization to caricature--to better answer the question: What is the Internet, anyway?

With 150,000 or so old print maps to his name, David Rumsey has earned his reputed place among the world's "finest private collectors." He continues to expand his personal trove as well as the digitized sub-collection he makes open to the public online — some 38,000 strong, and growing.

He's created a series of interactive maps that layer old prints onto the Google Earth and Google Maps platforms, and this summer he plans to launch a geo-referencing tool (similar to one recently introduced by the British Library) that lets users get involved in the digital mapping process themselves.

While preparing for this next expansion of his online map empire, Rumsey remains fascinated by "the power of putting these images up and letting them go," he says.

"Maps have a way of speaking to people very straightforward," he says. "You don't have to have a lot of knowledge of map history or history in general. To me they're perfect tools for teaching history to the public."

Belgian studio Coming Soon is all about making it big. Their Hand Lettering creations filled a giant chalkboard with letters in a variety of fonts and styles. And with Infographics XXXL, they’ve taken actual graphs and blown them up to a huge size for a client that specializes in the research of nanobodies.

The result is that, instead of casually glancing at the same old pie chart or bar graph, shareholders have something to keep their gaze on the numbers, like a blurry scientist walking by human-size bars or holding up a literal piece of the pie.

See a selection of Coming Soon’s giant infographics at the article link.

When it comes to visualizing data, it’s important to pick the right graph and the right kind of data range. Make it too detailed, and information gets lost and the reader leaves confused. Too simplified, and your data’s integrity is weakened.

Choosing the right infographic element shouldn’t be an art but common sense. After all, it’s an infographic – readers should get the gist of things at first glance and not have to get crossed-eyed in making sense of things...

Big Data has become an essential part of the world of business, providing billions of data points from targeted audiences globally.

Data points are comprised of the market intelligence that have been gathered into consumer behavior, purchasing patterns and brand affinity across numerous verticals from auto, tech, gaming, health and beauty, entertainment, and travel, among others.

The customer intelligence derived from actionable data helps identify markets and customers, measure brand loyalty and pinpoint new trends; ultimately, helping companies understand what people think.

Big data doesn’t come from one source, but from a multitude of sources – surveys, focus groups, mobile feedback, purchase history and customer service to name a few...

There’s no mystery here: companies want to sell things. Increasingly, they’re turning to infographics to do it. But overt advertising undermines everything infographics do best. Instead of informing and delighting the viewer with valuable data portrayed with graphical verve, ads cheapen and annoy. More often than not, they land the project deep in the Internet’s vast wasteland of unshared content.

Infographics aren’t just ads dressed up in new shoes, they’re something else: a refreshing, informative, fun, and shareable tool for communication that we can actually enjoy consuming. Also, when done right, infographics can still help bolster a company or product’s public image.

Here are some oh so subtly advertorial infographics that show you how to get the balance right...

We’re deep in the midst of a data viz heyday. Infographics are ubiquitous, presenting facts and data sets in straightforward ways that are, by design, easy to understand.

Willem Besselink takes a different approach by translating directed sets of information into physical forms. What’s not explicit, however, are the complex stats that inspire each work.

Each new installation is dictated by its own unique guidelines and rules, which themselves are based on a number of dependent variables, including site-specifics, materials, color scheme, and budget. “Setting these up and following them all through the project allows--or forces--me to do what needs to be done,” he says, in part following the lead of “hero” Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art.

It is no great revelation that architects tend to look up when exploring a city. It’s the best way to guage size, scale, placement, composition and detail – all the information required to process the qualities of a space or place.

Having spent the last few days looking up and considering the architectural impact of the New York City grid-plan layout, this article takes a particular interest in the domestic scale elements that help to service the city and punctuate the rigidity.

At first the brain identifies the rhythm of the brick formation and the window layouts, it is this assumption of regularity that leaves many with this very valid conclusion based on the verticality of the grid. But in identifying this pattern – the eye becomes more accustomed, searching for further geometries or perhaps more importantly, exceptions to the rule.

Typography is a key element of any graphic design.

Any computer contains hundreds of pre-installed fonts to choose from and there are dozens of websites with thousands of free fonts, just some minimal knowledge and aesthetic taste.

That’s right, there’s more to infographics than a scrolling image full of facts and figures. Different types of infographics are consumed differently.

The right kind of infographic should match your data to your narrative and ensure that people take away your message after reading it.

While infographics may not come in that many shapes or sizes (600 x 1,800 pixels is the norm), that doesn’t mean there’s a stock standard infographic for you.  

Use the flowchart to help you decide which infographic is right for you...

Explore Shutterstock's annual design trends infographic to find out what the biggest trends of the year will be.

Shutterstock licenses more images than anyone on the web, allowing for some pretty insightful trend forecasting.

After creating the first design-trends infographic last year; this year's incorporates increased data and images, and provides a more in-depth look at what to expect in the year ahead.
Check out the full infographic at the article link, then read on for 10 favorite takeaways...

It wasn’t malicious. The file itself was the size of a small JPEG. It was given the absolute lowest priority. And it was set to self-destruct if anything went wrong. But this small file allowed one single hacker to measure the Internet activity of nearly half a million connected devices around the world, then share the results with everyone.

How was this even possible? The "hacker" barely hacked anything. In reality, they gained access to all these systems because each had the default "root" set as a password. With this access in hand, they ran several tests focusing on Internet structure and activity. And what they created from all this data is a spectacular map that captures a day in the life of the Internet (and all of its users).

Mankind loves making maps, and the world wide web, densely interconnected and phenomenally complex, always makes for a nice visual.

Typically these take the form of neon blobs floating against black backgrounds, like frames captured from old Winamp plug-ins, and while they’re always nice to look at, they don’t always do much in the way of helping us understand the massive global network we traverse every day. This latest effort, however, is a little different. Called simply Map of the Internet, it’s as informative as it is beautiful.

The map, which takes the form of a free app for Android and iOS, features 22,961 of the Internet’s biggest nodes--not individual websites, but the ISPs, universities, and other places that host them--joined by some 50,000 discrete connections. The app gives you two ways of surveying it all: geographically, on a globe, or by size, which rearranges the nodes into a loose column of points. Both views are interactive; instead of showing the Internet as a static neon blob, the app lets you explore the neon blob in the round, with all the familiar multitouch gestures. It may not look like the Google Maps app, but it instantly feels like it, which makes exploring the underbelly of the web all the easier...