The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization

Introduction: Infographics and Visualization

The remarkable mechanisms by which the senses understand the environment are all but identical with the operations described by the psychology of thinking.

—Rudolf Arnheim, from Visual Thinking

The partnership of presentation and exploration

If you asked me to choose one mystery that has fascinated me through the years, it would be our brain’s ability to create and understand visual representations with different degrees of abstraction: graphics that encode data, concepts, connections, and geographical locations. How is it possible that the brain, a wrinkled chunk of meat and fat squeezed into a cavity too small for its size, can accomplish such challenging tasks? This book is my personal attempt to ...