David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut -- and it may just change the way we see the world.

McCandless' genius is not so much in finding jazzy new ways to show data -- the actual graphics aren't the real innovation here -- as in finding fresh ways to combine datasets to let them ping and prod each other

As Taciano Moraes wrote down in the discussion section, the most interesting on this talk was that changing the way of visualizing information we can reach another level of comprehension and generate a new kind of (more) information:

• Looking closer we can discover details.
• Looking wider we can discover patterns.

In this time of information overload, we just have to pay some attention on how to look at it to find what we want it.