Information is Beautiful

I've been perusing around this website www.informationisbeautiful.net which is rather intriguing; it's a collection of visually appealing ways to display statistics which you could never imagine. It may give you a whole new perspective on the endless possibilities of sharing data beyond a line, bar or pie. The one I found cool was "The Billion Dollar Gram" which to me, dare I say it, is a neat pie chart. It displays the amount of dollars spent on different things in the media such as the war in Iraq, advertising, the illegal drug market and so forth - putting them all into perspective relative to one another. Here's a snippet of it...

This is the bio of David McCandless, the designer of this project.

"I’ve written for The Guardian, Wired and others. I’m into anything strange and interesting. These days I’m an independent visual & data journalist. My passion is for visualising information – facts, data, ideas, subjects, issues, statistics, questions – all with the minimum of words. I’m interested in how designed information can help us understand the world, cut through BS and reveal hidden connections, patterns and stories underneath. Or, failing that, it can just look cool!"