The Billion Dollar Gram

As “Billion” becomes the new “Million” while the government continue to dump money into the economy in hopes of staving off disaster, David McCandless, an information designer in London, had combined several financial figures from government and corporations around the world to try and give some scale to the figures.

This image arose out of a frustration with the reporting of billion dollar amounts in the media. That is, they’re reported as self-evident facts, when, in fact, they’re mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context. But they can start to be understood visually and relatively, IMHO.

(This is one of the first images I created for my book. So a lot of the figures are from 2006/07. I’ve also visually cheated slightly here and there to make everything fit)

via The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .