“Clutter is not a property of information.
Clutter is a failure of design.”
– Edward Tufte
Finding a way to tell a complex story in a simple way feels like a magic trick.
This graphic uses a radial bar graph to save space for both a headline and a line graph (background). In doing so, the single graphic is able to standalone without the need for additional copy for context. And it manages to communicate the total scale of Covid-19 deaths (at the time of publishing) compared to the 11 other most deadly events in U.S. history, and also to convey the steep escalation in Covid deaths over a 12-month period.
From an editorial spread in the Summer 2024 issue of Florida Physician magazine. The story “A Living Library” captures the scale and global importance of the natural products collection at UF Scripps. Globally, around 500,000 natural products’ genomes have been sequenced thus far. The collection at UF Scripps accounts for 15,000 of those, with nearly 4 Million more samples awaiting characterization. I made an infographic out of the entire third spread of the piece to emphasize this. The box containing the copy represents the UF Scripps collection’s potential relative to the number of products already sequenced globally, and the overlap of the two shows just how much of the collection remains to be characterized. The green portions at the right illustrate the uses for natural products such as these, as well as the outsized proportions of medicines and cancer treatments that are created using natural product collections like the one at UF Scripps.
A pair of graphics describes a proposed change to Alachua County commission representation. The campaign to convert from at-large to single-member districts in 2022 was riddled with misinformation. These graphics were my personal attempt to combat that misinformation and explain the true nature of the bill. The misinformation won, but only temporarily. In 2024, voters passed a referendum to dispose of single-member districts and convert back to at-large representation.
Michael McAleer 