GDS International sent us their most recent infographic which helps visualize this significant power usage by the data centers in the US that help power the Internet.

Attempting to escape chain restaurants and big box stores in the US can seem like an impossible task. On a recent road trip, artist Stephen Von Worley noticed that they were popping up everywhere, even in the middle of formerly barren landscapes.

Information Aesthetics points us to some curious but useful infographics stickers for the home.

How many solar panels would it take to power the entire planet? 496,805 square kilometers of surface area could do the trick.

GOOD Magazine’s Transparency section, the folks who make the swanky infographics we regularly admire, were recently interviewed by The Bygone Bureau. The infographics are known for taking staggering and complex chunks of statistical data and converting them into digestible and often beautiful visual representations.
GOOD Magazine brings in different designers to work on the graphics and tackle issues from immigration to fuel efficiency, often putting a new perspective on a current predicament. Phil Lubliner, a Brooklyn-based designer, discussed his experience working on a Transparency graphic:
“We’ve always admired the way other designers had solved the challenges the Transparencies presented,” Lubliner said. “There’s [...]

Justin Wehr points us to an eye-opening infographic that clarifies how certain airlines can keep their ticket prices so low.
[Cool Infographics via Wehr In The World]

Artist 1chord & a fib has created a wonderful series of “infographics” that don’t contain any information. Playing off of information design’s current wave of popularity, the fake infographics maintain all the beauty of the medium but lack actual meaning or content.
[via GOOD]

Similar to the In-Formed project we wrote about recently, Form Follows Data is a project by Tel Aviv based lohi design that uses custom-made physical objects to represent usage and behavior patterns associated with them.
lohanna, the projects creator explains:
“Form Follows Data is a project based on the formal language of statistic data, which we are exposed to everyday. The sources of the data are my body, my habits and my environment. Then, a dish set that brings to mind a cake graph is the visualization of a blood test and a glasses set shaped as a column graph represent the [...]

GOOD Magazine has made an archive of its wonderfully designed ‘Transparencies’ series of infographics available on Flickr. The images span myriad graphic styles and cover compelling, disparate topics, from global sugar consumption to public transit.
[via Kottke]

We’ve written about the role of data visualization influencing consumers to be more aware of their impact. This past weekend, we noticed Fast Company suggesting that data visualization is the new frontier to design.
If we’re going to live in a world driven by data, the thinking goes, we need a simple means of digesting it all. We are increasingly a visual society, and our understanding of the world is increasingly made possible by this new visual language.
Some of the examples they site include an interactive swine flu map created by The NY Times, showcasing the most popular sites online in [...]

Everything is information and information is everything. It’s the mantra of marketing in an age where people are constantly creating collectible data—all the things we do, say, use, buy, click and share are data points in the graphs of our lives. But in an increasingly visual society, pie charts and bar charts can’t begin to do justice to this wealth of information there is to digest now. Data visualization tools are helping to change the ways we look at information and audiences. While a lot of these are just plain fun to look at, there is far more potential than [...]

Berlin-based Gestalten Verlag have just released a new book that takes a deeper look into data visualisation in graphic design.

Data Flow is a 256 page compendium of various outstanding projects in the field of information visualisation. The book’s intro offers some nice thought starters on the subject:
“We live in a world where every idea has been thought of before, and it becomes too easy to use the Microsoft template for presenting our data. The visual form we adopt becomes driven by the tool or the topic we are presenting, rather than the usefulness of the data or the insight [...]

It’s about that time when most people carve a minute or two out of their busy schedules to think about the year that was – to recount, reflect, and learn. For the last three, Nicholas Felton has been taking the exercise several steps further with his Feltron Annual Report: a statistical analysis of the things he did, saw, consumed, and performed over the preceding year, compiled into one visually stunning anthology. Felton, a NY-based graphic designer, has been recording nearly every aspect of his daily life to uncover patterns in his behavior and share them in a telling and compelling [...]