Was talking about visualization the other day with Art Director extraordinaire Woody Batts and how graphic visualization of data often reveals patterns and structures that we would not have been able to recognize previously…and how those patterns are often ones immediately recognizable in other contexts (and because of those contexts). Example: The Golden Ratio.

Summary and Abstraction are two of the most important abilities that Marketers or Storytellers can use to help communicate complex concepts and value propositions, and there are some very technical tools out there to inspire/enable you. As Stephen Wolfram’s New Science is taking some time to be adopted by all of humanity, he’s been kind enough to publish it to the web for free, with a number of nifty tools and libraries to go with.

For more accessible inspiration, see the modern godfather of information design, Edward Tufte… and his dog photography… (really!)

(Tufte wasn’t the first to popularize visual thinking, by the way. See this clip from 1966.)

Brilliant! Now let’s be serious.

For getting your hands dirty, A Beautiful WWW hosts an outstanding compilation of 20 Visualization Libraries. The fact that so many of these are open source and intended for use non comp-sci majors is inspiring to me in a progress of technology sort of way. Here’s a couple of previews:

Next, Personal Visualization Project contest winners were recently announced at data visualization super-site FlowingData.com. Bookmark it and make it part of your regular Sunday reading. Here’s my favorite:

More on all this juicy stuff later…