Jessica Palmer has published a review of the book Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand. The book itself is a distilled collection of infographics from author Connie Malamed. She selected infographics which take complicated or scientific ideas, reduces them down to a visually interesting image which then causes us to ask questions and seek answers. For example, the bat flight model infographic, which was a 2007 AAAS Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge winner, shows how fruit bats wings and the air around them distorted as the animals flew in a wind tunnel. From the review:
I particularly enjoyed two chapters: “Make the Abstract Concrete” and “Clarify Complexity.” For most science topics, these are the biggest challenges – first, to take an abstract figure or concept (like magnetism, global warming, industrial processing, aging, or annual deaths from cancer) and turn it into a recognizable graphic; second, to distill the incredibly complex systems involved down to a few salient points, without misrepresenting the whole shebang.
via Book Review: Visual Language for Designers (and Scientists)
