Infographics and Diagrams

Charts, networks, timelines and diagrams that turn information into visual form, and artists who borrow them.

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About

Infographics and diagrams turn information into shape: bars, networks, timelines, flows and maps. They came of age in the 19th century. Florence Nightingale's wedge-shaped ‘rose’ diagrams of 1858 showed that preventable disease killed more soldiers in the Crimean War than wounds did, and Charles Joseph Minard's chart of Napoleon's Russian campaign (1869) traces the shrinking army as a narrowing band. W. E. B. Du Bois's team drew bold, colourful charts of Black American life for the Paris Exposition of 1900.

Artists later borrowed the form for other ends. Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s flowchart for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) mapped modernism as a family tree. Mark Lombardi drew delicate pencil networks of money and power behind political scandals in the 1990s, Channa Horwitz invented a colour-coded notation of movement she called Sonakinatography, and Ward Shelley hand-draws sprawling timelines of cultural history. Paula Scher paints dense, hand-lettered maps.