The Future of Food

Wired magazine has a great series of nine infographics from the November issue about the world's food supply problems.

Forty years ago, advances in fertilizers and pesticides boosted crop yield and fed a growing planet. Today, demand for food fueled by rises in worldwide consumption of meat and protein is again outpacing farmers ability to keep up. It's time for the next Green Revolution.

Thanks for the link Ethel!  Here are a few more.  Check them all out on Wired.com.

 

Classic infographic from 1823!

Here's a classic from 1823!  It a hand drawn infographic titled "Comparative Heights of the Principal Mountains and Lengths of the Principal Rivers of The World" by WR Gardner.  The high resolution image is on Flickr, but the post about the image is on bibliodyssey.blogspot.com.

This one makes a great poster!  Thanks Roi for sharing in the comments.

Map of Newspaper Presidential Endorsements

Staying on the presidential election theme, here's a great infographic on infochimps.org.  Red shows newspapers endorsing McCain, and Blue show newspapers endorsing Obama.  The inner color of each circle also represents which candidate the newspaper endorsed in the 2004 election.  The size of the circle represents each newspapers circulation.

Also notice the mismatch between the newspaper endorsement and each state's "Red vs. Blue" alignment.

Thanks Garrett for the link!

Does Your Vote Matter? YES!

Sticking with the stuff from GOOD magazine, this is one of the GOOD Sheets available for sale as a poster at Starbucks for a limited time.  I've been looking for some good election related graphics.  There are a ton out there, but I'm looking for the gems.

I hear all the time that people don't think their vote matters, and in some cases it may get lost in an election that isn't close or competitive.  However, you never actually know if a race is going to be close or not (unless there is only one candidate).

In some of our local elections, I've seen some decisions put up to vote that won by only 12 votes!

I'm not pushing any specific politcal opinion, just that everyone should get out and vote.  Early voting is already open in many areas, so do your part and be heard!

It's the Economy, Stupid!

Great timeline from GOOD Magazine (via picdit.com).

What most of the doom-and-gloom reports on our economy don’t provide is perspective—a historical survey of an economy that’s been through more than a few ups and downs in its day. Here’s a farsighted view of how our temperamental economic machine works, and a close-up of how it stands today.

Thanks Adam!

NEW Death and Taxes 2009 poster

New Death and Taxes infographic for 2009!  Interactive viewer let's you zoom in to see all of the details.

"Death and Taxes:2009" is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes. The data is from the President's budget request for 2009. It will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress by October 1st to begin the fiscal year.

The poster provides a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster. 

The Death and Taxes poster from 2007 was my initial post on Cool Infographics, so I'm very excited to see this update.  Now the 2009 version is available to purchase as a poster here.

Brand Tags

BrandTags.net is a project by Noah Brier that gathers user input to create tag clouds for many of the biggest brands in our culture.  You can add your own input into the project on the main page, or browse brand results.  The example above is for Velveeta.

VizThink 2009

So VizThink Europe was this last weekend, and I came across this infographic ad in Fast Company magazine.  The next VizThink in the U.S. is coming up quickly.  February 22-25 in San Jose, CA.

Again, my friends at VizThink have created a discount code that I can offer to the readers of Cool Infographics!  Use the code BCRK01 to get $100 off of the standard registration price!

Special thanks to Ryan and the gang at VizThink!

$100 Off regular admission

DISCOUNT CODE: BCRK01

Air Traffic Worldwide movie

Air Traffic Worldwide 24HR from kouko a on Vimeo.

Very similar to the Flight Patterns video I posted back in October 2007, this is a video showing all commercial flight in the world over a 24-hour period.  The previous video was only the U.S., but this one shows the entire world.  It also shows the day/night areas and you can see the increase in air traffic as dawn rises around the world.  Its from the Zhaw School of Engineering in Zurich.

Found via FlowingData.com

Savings Mis-Trust video

Our friends over at XPLANE have done a fabulous video explaining what led up to the recent credit crisis in the U.S. economy.  A great job simplifying a complex problem.

Thanks Parker, and great job to your team!

Watercube, The Book

Watercube, is a new book by Ethel Baraona Pohl.  The book is about the National Aquatics Centre built in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, and has some cool infographics inside.  Some of the graphics were contributed by architect César Reyes Nájera.  A review of the book can be found here on www.v2com.biz

WATERCUBE: The Book is a complete monographic publication about the National Swimming Center for the Beijing Olympics 2008. With an exhaustive description about the Watercube we present a detailed study of the project. The book makes an holistic approach to the project that starts with a brief description of urban and social changes that China has been experienced in the last decade. These facts have encouraged the construction boom that made possible these kind of projects occur in cities like Beijing.

 

This page compared the amount of steel used to built the Watercube to some of the most well known buildings around the world.

This page shows a comparison to the same set of buildings around the world, but shows the tons of CO2 produced due to the steel used in their construction.

This page is one of the years of the timeline leading up to the construction of the Watercube.

Here you can buy Watercube, by Ethel Baraona Pohl, on Amazon.com.

Special thanks to Ethel for sharing the images from her book, and allowing me to post them on Cool Infographics!

Vampire Energy infographic video & chart

From GOOD magazine, they created an infographic video about Vampire Energy, all of the energy used by electronics in your house while you are not actively using them.  The chart itself from the magazine is fairly simple chart, but I really like it.  It's effective getting the message across with simple graphics.

The Age of Pop

From verysmallarray.com, the Age of Pop visualizes the #1 songs every week from 1960-1969.  You can see that Pop ruled the decade.  Check out their home page to see how other decades sounded.

The influence of Josef Müller-Brockmann Typography

Very cool infographic showing the the influence of Josef Müller-Brockmann.  By Quentin Delobel, it's on his site www.quentindelobel.com.

Josef Müller-Brockmann was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher, mostly recognised for his simple designs and his clean use of typography, notably Helvetica.  This visualization is the result of a personal web research about Josef Müller-Brockmann and the international typographical style. It contains 3 key elements: (1) the research of information on the web, (2) chronological information on Josef Muller-Brockmann's life and links to the last part, and finally the last part (3) is composed of a critical article based on information found online. The project is in french.

Thanks to Filipe for sending in the link!