11 Graphics
Sidebar: The Origins of Information Graphics

Diagrams and information graphics arose in the nineteenth century from mapmaking, early scientific publishing and mass merchandising, and industrial-scale engineering and finance. In the hundred years from 1850 to 1950, mechanical reproduction and mass publishing created our current expectation that publishing media will present a mix of words, diagrams, data graphics, and photographs in a seamless multimedia narrative.

From: The World on Sunday

Remarkably modern-looking infographics spreads from Joseph Pulitzer's The Great Sunday World of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These spreads are the direct ancestors of today's rich world of integrated text and visual media.

Although such venerable magazines as National Geographic rightly deserve recognition for raising the standard of diagrammatic communications, the credit for creating the genre of elaborate explanatory diagrams and complex story visualizations actually goes to such early twentieth-century popular publishers as Joseph Pulitzer. In an age when publishers had powerful new tools of mass print communication but the “masses” were still largely illiterate, elaborate graphics gave a preliterate public the means to understand the increasingly complex industrial age.

Web graphics don't need to be dumbed-down to suit the relatively low resolution of the computer screen. The huge number of colors available on today's displays goes a long way to compensate for resolutions about one quarter that of fine print publications. From: Introduction to Cardiothoracic Imaging.

Medical illustrations by Patrick Lynch, freely available under CC license from Wikimedia.