In an age of high-speed living and information overload, visualized information has incredible potential to help us quickly understand, navigate, and find meaning in a complex world. McCandless turns complex data sets – like worldwide military spending, media buzz, and Facebook status updates – into beautiful, straightforward diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. He explores how infographics create simple ways to see information that might otherwise be too complex or scattered to be grasped.

In Information is Beautiful, McCandless and his cadre of “info designers” take a spin through the world of visualized data, from hard stats on politics and climate to daffy but no-less-important trends in pop music. His genius is not so much in finding jazzy new ways to show data – the actual graphics aren't the real innovation here – as it in finding fresh ways to combine datasets to let them ping and prod each other. Reporting the number of drug deaths in the UK every year is interesting; but mapping that data onto the number of drug deaths reported by the UK press, broken down by drug, is utterly fascinating (more deaths by marijuana were reported than in fact occurred, by a factor of 484%). Read Less ^