Vintage Infographics From the 1930s

Nathan Yau of FlowingData has made an awesome discovery of some classic vintage information visualizaiton.

Someone needs to get me a paper copy of Willard Cope Brinton’s Graphic Presentation (1939), because it is awesome.

Brinton discusses various forms of graphic presentation in the 524-page book and what works and what doesn’t. There’s also some good stuff in there about how to make your graphs, charts, maps, etc (by hand).

It’s amazing that even though this book is 70 years old, many of the visualizations look very similar to stuff we make today.

Vintage Infographics From the 1930s | FlowingData.

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 .