This book is my personal crown juwel: Infographics are abundant today, but few people know they have been around for centuries. They have always worked as a tool for understanding. And they have been used to explain every possible topic from cosmos to religion, from diseases to market prices. In this beautiful book, I have assembled an enormous collection from the past 800 years. Available from TASCHEN in three languages|
The ”Napoleon Map“ by the French engineer Charles-Joseph Minard is one of the most cited works of data visualization. Unfortunately, it is still highly relevant|
This was a thrilling discovery tour: “Napoleon’s Russian Campaign” (1869) is one of the most famous infographics ever. The man who created it was Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), a little known F…| sandrarendgen.wordpress.com
Understanding time as a linear vector feels natural today, but it is the result of a long tradition of graphic “time maps”. One crucial innovation was the “Chronographie”, an enormous historical map published in France in 1753. A new book tells us everything about it|
Will Burtin (1908-1972) was a German graphic designer working in the US, whose work fuses influences from Bauhaus to Buckminster Fuller. He was also a brilliant conceptual thinker, who used visuali…| sandrarendgen.wordpress.com
Punch cards were used as data storage for early computers. Their graphic design is optimized for the machines that processed them – but also for the humans who were involved in the process. This cr…| sandrarendgen.wordpress.com
One of my favorite collaborations: An urban installation in the city of Breda that made the history of infographics tangible, in the truest sense of the word. Together with the Graphic Design festi…| sandrarendgen.wordpress.com
Bar charts are everywhere today. Back around 1800, they came as a complicated visual that required abstract thinking. Was it the recording of flood levels that inspired them?| sandrarendgen.wordpress.com
Digital archives are great to have, but hard to experience. This interactive installation lets us look at the daily work of über-artist Leonardo da Vinci, via one of his famous collections of drawi…| sandrarendgen.wordpress.com
Like many authors, German novelist Theodor Fontane was a voracious reader — and he loved to annotate his books. An interactive installation provides a glimpse into what he was after| sandrarendgen.wordpress.com
