Prepare for an eye-splosion: 601 of the planet’s most brilliant data visualizations & infographics

Longlistees this year cover Bruce Springsteen to The Big Lebowski; cryptocurrencies to cricket, with data rendered in media as varied as drywall, marble runs & even underwear.

Soak up the magnificence of these entries:

The 2018 Information is Beautiful Awards Longlist:

» Arts, Entertainment & Culture
» Breaking News
» Humanitarian
» Leisure, Games & Sport
» Maps, Places & Spaces
» People, Language & Identity
» Politics & Global
» Science & Technology
» Unusual
» Visualization & Information Design

With so many works looking at dataviz itself, we placed all the meta stuff in Visualization & Information Design. History & food is moved to Arts, Entertainment & Culture. Pieces on activism, charity, disasters & relief go to Humanitarian.

Shortlist & visitor vote starts Weds 10 Oct

Winners will be announced New York City Tues 4 Dec, sharing $25,000 in prizes.

Good luck!

» Follow the Awards on Twitter | Facebook | Blog | Email

Senior editor/writer/journalist/creative person required to spearhead an awesome new mega project.

Flexitime, remote working. Would suit a self-motivating self-starter.

A rare opportunity to join our unique, independent infodesign collective. If you’re an editorial person who loves graphics, get in touch. Closing date: Fri 28th Sep 2018.

 
» Details

Apple’s heading to a likely $trillion dollar valuation. You thought a billion was hard to conceptualise. Try imagining a trillion.

Here’s a quick graphic to help.

» trillions

Are we alone in the universe? Is there life on other planets? Or has the Fermi Paradox kicked in?

Tune this interactive Drake Equation calculator to reveal the current chances of intelligent alien life in the universe.

And play with the lesser-known Seager Equation to calculate the chances of inhabited planets in our galactic neighbourhood.

Diet, exercise and other choices play a huge role in cancer risk. We worked with The World Cancer Research Fund to chart the latest science.

» explore the interactive data-visualization

The Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards is open for 2018.

Thanks to our beloved sponsor, we have $25k in cash prizes to give away. 25 expert judges plus a public vote, decide who takes away the trophies.

To mark our seventh year honouring the world’s most awesome information design, we present the Breaking News category – for work created to a tight deadline.

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We were honoured to be invited to provide an interactive data-exhibition for the recently opened, Rem Koolhaas-designed Qatar National Library.

Simultaneously a public, academic and research library, QNL is a beautiful, light-drenched arena dedicated to knowledge and information from all cultures and all ages.

We created ten interactive data-visualizations to run on a series of 3-metre touchscreen totems, two-sided, one face in English, the other Arabic.

The exhibition is a visual, interactive swim through many rich topics: the history of civilisation, Middle-Eastern science, social media & reading habits, plus our fabled Snake Oil Supplements graphics and updates of Timeline of the Far Future and the Billion Dollar O Gram.

One big learning: data-visualizations look great in Arabic! The calligraphic type adds elegance and curvature to the starker data shapes.

We found that huge touchscreens introduce all kinds of design and user-experience issues for interactive visualizations. Shaping bi-lingual data content to engage library audiences of all ages – and heights – was also challenging. We’ll reveal our process in a later post.

You’ll be seeing more exhibitions and installations from us in the future.

Until then, if you’re ever in Doha, don’t miss the incredible building, the million or so books, and the rather beautiful colonnade of data displays.

Spotify edges closer to a float on the stock market with a valuation of between $6-$20 billion. Who will most likely be receiving a slice of the cash windfall?

Our best estimates and guesses – visualized.

No surprises that the big four record-companies may own as much as 16% of Spotify, meaning a potential payout of up to $650 million.

Which they will no doubt immediately share with all the musicians and artists who have made Spotify such a desirable platform, right?