The recently released book “Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design” available at Amazon.com and Gestalten.de seems to be an ideal Christmas gift. The book introduces an expansive scope of innovatively designed diagrams, and presents an in visualizing data and information. These range from chart-like diagrams such as bar, plot, line diagrams and spider charts, graph-based diagrams including line, matrix, process flow, and molecular diagrams to extremely complex three-dimensional diagrams. Or, put differently: “The more concrete the variables, the more aesthetically elaborate the graphics - sometimes reaching the point of art - the more abstract, the simpler the readability.”

While infosthetics would *love* a review copy to be featured on this blog, some teaser images of the book seem already quite seducing, and the online video trailer quite appetizing.

My copy finally arrived in the mail this week. I love it, the book is beautifully put together and features a great range of different types and styles of data visualisation. The only minor criticism would be that some of the graphics could have been printed a bit larger, hard to read some of the labels and text to understand what’s going on.

In regards to Jon’s point, I did notice that some of the featured graphics had a clear artistic undertone. That ‘playfulness’ I think I couldn’t get away with in my work as an interactive designer, where usability always comes before ornamentation, but nevertheless I found all examples to be highly inspirational and hope they will inform my own work in some way. I think that successful data visualisation needs to strike the right balance between functionality and visual appeal. Artistic influences can help there.