The Art of Information

This week’s installment of Today’s Required Reading is an excellent infographic, but before we get to that, a challenge - take a moment and recall the first decade of the 21st century, the years from January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2009. Got it? Now, think in terms of topics like the “Biggest News Story” or most impactful logo (corporate or other) that stood out in any given year. Pick one for each. It’s difficult to do so for a single year, let alone all ten years between 2000-2009.

This is just what Phillip Neimeyer, an art director with Double Triple Design in Brooklyn, NY, has done however. Creating a simple infographic published in the NY Times in the final days of 2009. Simple, yes, but sophisticated too, in terms of the amount of information it conveys and its ability to distill 10 years and 1,000s of possible data points down to a manageable amount.

(C) 2009 The New York Times Company

It’s a great example of how visualizing information in logos, simple icons, or a few words can evoke meaning and resurrect long-forgotten memories.

Thinking forward to what we might see in the updated 2019 version of this; I could see “Cloud” in the “Business” category for 2010 and “Tweet” in the “Verb” category.

I’d love to have seen this as an interactive infographic with links to relevant stories and backgrounders on each item, but it would be challenging to select a few that weren’t all links back to NYT, I suppose.

What’s your favorite, and what do you think we’ll be looking back at 10 years on in the tech, business, storage, or culture categories?