Visual languages can be more relational

Pic c/o The Economist Magazine

Stop me if you’ve seen these before but….

Please click on the first visual to enlarge.

It’s William Farr‘s famous representation of the relative importance of causes of death in the Crimean War and tells of some really interesting relationships of time, mortality, cause etc

Now the second visual (again click on to enlarge) is Minard’s graph of the the Napoleonic Russian Campaign (3 dimensions of time, place and mortality handled beautifully.

It takes some effort to do relational visuals but it is possible and totally clear to the reader. Maybe visual languages might help talk about some of the stuff we’re working on now?