Product Description

This beautifully illustrated book is the first complete handbook to visual information. Well written, easy to use, and carefully indexed, it describes the full range of charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and tables used daily to manage, analyze, and communicate information. It features over 3,000 illustrations, making it an ideal source for ideas on how to present information. It is an invaluable tool for anyone who writes or designs reports, whether for scientific journals, annual reports, or magazines and newspapers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72235 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

From Scientific American
This book will be particularly useful to people doing desktop publishing, will help introduce general readers to the language of graphic designers, and can be used as a guidebook for finding the best way to present graphic information. Recommended for all levels.

From The New Yorker
The breadth and depth of entries, examples, and cross-references are almost overwhelming. The book's 448 pages pack in more than 850 entries and nearly 4,000 illustrations covering everything from mundane pie charts to complex visualization techniques for data analysis and business operations. Readers can explore subjects to the depth necessary--it's all there. The writing is straightforward and precise without being overly technical, and presupposes no special knowledge of graphics or mathematics. I am glad to add Information Graphics to my technical communications library. I recommend that you add it also.

Review
The book is aimed at information designers and communicators in all industries, whatever their graphics expertise. Graphic designers, managers, programmers, students, planners, consultants, financial specialists, academics, and indeed virtually anyone who wants to communicate effectively on paper should find Information Graphics a valuable and enduring resource. -- The Xplorer, a publication of the Electronic Document Systems Association, August 1996

This book is a reviewer's delight: a resource that is not only well done but an unexpected treatment of a mainstream topic. Charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, and tables are ubiquitous in society as tools for communicating information visually, but this is the first publication that provides an in-depth treatment of their practical application. Every page has a half-dozen or more illustrations, and the page size of 8.5-by-11 inches makes for good legibility. The reference is highly recommended. -- American Reference Books Annual, 1997 volume 28, Libraries Unlimited, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The Full Repertoire of Existing Charts
This book is a gem. It's really a dictionary of just about all of the types of charts that exist with the exception of interactive ones of course (we'll excuse the author though). If you have a problem and you think that some form of chart could help you then this book should contain the answer. Note that this isn't a book that you'd read from cover to cover though.

Keep this reference by your side to help your data tell its story
I think anyone who solves serious problems by analyzing data will want to own a copy of this book. Being able to organize data into the right visual image can often make no less a difference than that between seeing the answer to the problem vs. getting lost in the complexity and variation in the data.

This is a uniquely comprehensive encyclopedia of graphical techniques with just enough detail on each technique to help you choose the right one for each situation.

There are no long, detailed explanations of principles. What you get are a few illustrations of each type of graph, with a general description of the strengths of that particular technique and several variations to show how it could be applied to different situations which share some central similarity.

One review criticized the alphabetic listing of the techniques, which is a reasonable critique in general. However I think the weakness is mitigated significantly by the way the graphs are grouped together into broad categories once you get to those. The alphabetically listed individual headings are mainly for cross-reference. It seems clear to me that the book wasn't intended to be read from front to back alphabetically, but that the reader would have a rough idea what sort of graph they needed, would start with the heading for that category, and then when neccessary, would refer to the cross-referenced section alphabetically.

In any case, I found it useful to place sticker-tabs on the pages for the main categories of graph that I care most about, and use those tabs as my starting place for choosing the right graphic. There are about ten broad categories of graphs I usually care most about, such as bar, area, column, line, and point graphs, control charts, statistical distribution charts, and time/activity charts. In addition there are about another dozen or so big categories of topics about graphs in general, such as choosing the right aspect ratio, the right font, and the right scale.

Don't get the wrong idea here, none of these topics is covered in great detail, this book is wonderful *index* to visual techniques for showing data for operational purposes but it is not a detailed how-to or an academic treatise on the individual techniques. Also, the book is not intended for creating flashy presentation or marketing graphics, nor does it cover argument maps, truth maps, or any other single sort of conceptual maps in any great detail (although it does touch on the topic in general).

A welcome bonus is that the bibliography is particularly well selected, and not just a list of popular books on graphs. Some of his references are difficult to get and I suspect that some of these sources may even out of print, but some of them like Tukey's work and William Cleveland's texts are well worth searching for.

This is an indispensible encyclopedia of operational information graphics for helping you to help data tell its own story in its clearest and most revealing light, whether you are trying to manage the quality of a process or track down the source of a problem. The examples are extremely well chosen and representative, and the explanations are concise and helpful in a way that lets you use this as a quick reference and not just as a textbook.

excellent reference guide for graphs/charts
this is an excellent book if you are working with different types of graphs or charts. we use it as the bible while programming gui tools to create graphs. if you are looking to make meaningful graphs, this book can clue you in to the different types of graphs that will best illustrate your data.