Illustrated book "History of Information Graphics": 1000 years explanatory pictures

Well, that starts off well! If you believe the first illustration in this book, then the infographic itself is an "impossibility in its purest form". The picture shows a Penrose Triangle - an impossible geometric figure, three bars that each seem to be at right angles to each other and yet form a triangle. On the bars, the Italian art director Francesco Franchi has written the requirements for an infographic. "Color", "Logic", "Layout", but also "Journalism" "Simplicity" and "Objectivity" Translated, this roughly means: The infographic has an egg-laying woolly milk sow.

Various volumes on the topic have been published by Taschen Verlag in recent years. But where they are mainly concerned with current trends, the latest issue of the history of visual information is dedicated. Because the concept of infographic may be new, the form of presentation is not.

As early as 800 AD, the monks of the Reichenau Monastery on Lake Constance drew the so-called "Plan of St. Gallen". The outline map stitched together from five parchment leaves shows the accurately labeled top view of a monastery complex that never existed before. No blueprint, no draft, but a work that should make the idea of ​​monastic life understandable and visualize information: an infographic, then.

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Many of the illustrations from this period are still relevant today, because the chosen representation principles are still used. Already in the 9th century, astronomers drew lines between two axes to depict the relationship between two features - their line diagram illustrated planetary orbits in the sky. Also pie charts and the still common way to draw a pedigree, are already in the Middle Ages.

Nevertheless, the infographic often suffered from the perception of a certain lack of history. This book changes that. It takes the reader into a stream of time that stretches from the early Middle Ages to the present. The milestones documented, but also provokes desire on the side proves.

"I drown in fantastic material"

The author Sandra Rendgen initially had to worry about not having enough source material at all. But that quickly changed in the research: "I came to a point relatively quickly, where I found: I drown in fantastic material," she says.

1000 years explanatory pictures on 450 large-format pages, loosened up by four chapters, which were curated by collectors and dedicated to individual areas of the subject. From sliced ​​bodies to the inner life of aircraft, from maps of the seabed to the cross section of the earth's crust, the range extends. Many things are legible even hundreds of years later, others lead to an immediate sensory overload. Some of it has already been seen.

Albrecht Dürer's not quite accurate woodcut of a rhinoceros from 1515, which the artist created only after a sketch and hearsay, but was nevertheless spread for 200 years. The illustrations from the Schedel world chronicle, which were written in a similar time and which claimed no less than the claim to draw a universal history of the world. Or the plates from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's most extensive scientific work, the color theory of 1810.

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Sandra Rendgen
History of Information Graphics

Publishing company:

BAGS

Pages:

462

Price:

EUR 50,00

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A century later in the book it stands out how much of our world is now explaining infographics. If we stand in front of one of these panoramic maps in a ski area, showing where the mountain railways and lifts run, then we move in a tradition that goes back 100 years, for example to the Austrian painter Henrich Caesar Berann, who already lived in the 1930s drew the most breathtaking hybrids of mountain panorama and cartography.

And if we're on the metro in any metropolis in the world, following the colorful lines of the plan, perhaps we owe it to the design studio, Unimark, that created the famous New York subway plan in 1972 Reduction, in its geometry initially met with little enthusiasm among the population and yet served as a blueprint for transport companies around the world.

Even infographics have been sent to space. The "Pioneer" badge from 1972, says the book, "is the most ambitious attempt to graphically convey information." The two gold-plated aluminum plates were mounted on the spacecraft Pioneer 11 and 12. Their engraved facts and figures should give possible extraterrestrial discoverers information about the Earth, its inhabitants and our planetary system.