We are announcing special workshops and trainings to celebrate our 15th anniversary.  Coming up: A rare in-person session in LDN with IIB founder David McCandless (we do these once a year). A virtual workshop running on two half days and the regular full day session. Learn how to turn numbers, ideas & data into beautiful charts, graphics & stories. This year we’re adding a new “data storytelling” element so you can begin to learn how to shape and present powerful data stories and narratives. Next dates: In-person » Mon 8th July London, full day Virtual » Wed 19th/ Thu 20th June ..read more

Every month we pick and share some of our favourite infographics, visualisations and data stories. Here’s what we found in our work folders and around the web. CREATED BY US » Two Years of the Russia-Ukraine War – Key numbers. Casualties. Military spend. Foreign aid. » $$$Trillions – Vast spending figures plucked from news headlines. Updated for 2024. » Drugs – All of them. In one graphic. Easy to swallow? (Bluesky) » Vaccines work – Especially for Measles. (Mastodon) CREATED BY OTHERS » Ever heard of the Butter Line? and the somewhat related Scone Map? » A dazzling interactive graphic on the ..read more

We’ve updated our interactive LLM tracker with 30 new and notable LLMs including Anthropic Claude 3, Twitter’s Grok, all Mistral’s offerings, Google Gemini Pro, Apple’s MM1 (finally!) and Chinese LLMs like DeepSeek, GLM-4 and Xinghuo 3.5. We’ve also flagged up soon-to-be-released LLMs such as OpenAI’s rumoured open source model G3PO, Amazon’s mighty Olympus, Meta’s Llama 3 and of course ChatGPT-5. » See the visualization » Review the data » Here’s a great source we used with many most LLMs listed Made with VizSweet ..read more

To celebrate 15 years of Information is Beautiful this June, we’re hosting a series of rare and exclusive live performances in London, San Francisco, LA and potentially other cities – plus some virtual events for global timezones. IIB founder and TED speaker David McCandless will start the festivities by hitting the stage at the prestigious Royal Institution in London on Tue 25th June 2024. Look forward to 90 minutes of fun, surprise, aha’s and Eurekas as David shares his funniest, and most insightful and revelatory visuals and data stories. All performed in his unique style of “performance jo ..read more

Two years into the conflict this infographic data story reveals some of the harsh, hidden numbers around casualties, military budgets and foreign aid in the Russia-Ukraine war. In times of war, data is difficult to validate, information hard to find. We polled a variety of sources – institutes, traditional media, independent media, civic groups – to find credible estimates and answers to key questions. How many combatants have been killed and wounded? What % of territory has been won or lost? How much money is being spent on the war – and where does it come from? How important is the USA’s con ..read more

An interactive visualisation of all the cases and decisions Meta’s Oversight Board has taken between 2020 and today.  The semi-independent ‘Supreme Court’ deals with controversial content-moderation issues on Facebook and Instagram. Hate speech. Promotion of dangerous organisations Misinformation on important topics. The 20 members of the board have selected just 78 cases from over 1.3m submitted per year. See where they over-ruled or upheld Meta’s decisions – and whether you agree. Beyond Facebook, content moderation is a complex dilemma for many tech platforms, raising complex issues an ..read more

23andMe, Xfinity, X/Twitter and the Indonesian people (yes all of them) – are among the latest victims listed in our ongoing visualisation of data leaks, hacks and breaches (2023-2004) We’ve also updated the new interactive graphic – Breaches by Data Sensitivity – so you can see what kinds of records have been leaked (passwords, social security numbers, medical data). All made with our tool VizSweet. We’re now in our eighth year of updates. Let us know if we’ve missed any (but pretty please review the datasheet first). » Safely check if your details have been compromised in any recent data bre ..read more

Announcing a new season of our fun online intensives » Tue 5th Mar 2024 – UK/EU timezone » Tue 26th Mar 2024 – US timezone » Tue 30th Apr 2024 – AUS timezone » Streamable on-demand version now also available. Our trainings are a technicolour mix of lecture, exercises, discussion & techniques, hosted by IIB founder and author, David McCandless. » See what participants say Learn how to approach data-visualisation and infographic creation from an editorial ‘conceptual’ point of view, rather than a data POV. May be useful if you are: › Translating written reports ..read more

Ending the year on a positive note, our picks of positive trends and admirable global breakthroughs of 2023. Part of our Beautiful News project. There we surface the good news and happy data we can’t always see when fixated on the negativity of the news. » See the charticle » Explore the data and sources ..read more

A consensus cloud of the most mentioned novels in best-books-of-the-year polls. Which literary novels do the critics agree are the best of 2023? We’ve been updating this the last few years. It currently covers 2020-2023. » See the visualisation » Check the data Sources: Time Magazine, Washington Post, New York Times, The Guardian, Esquire, NPR, The New Yorker, Harpers, Kirkus, GoodReads, Booker Prize, Book Riot, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Publisher’s Weekly, Oprah’s Book List, Chicago Public Library, New York Public Library, Vogue. Dynamic word clouds generated with VizSweet.  ..read more