Edward Tufte points out the great infographics work of Megan Jaegerman, some of whose work is featured in Beautiful Evidence.

Megan Jaegerman produced some of the best news graphics ever done while working at The New York Times from 1990 to 1998….To create this display, [she] did both the research and the design, breaking their common alienation. This design amplifies the content, because the designer created the content.

When I visited an information design studio during a school visit to Carnegie Mellon, the professor asked me for my input on some of the student projects, many of which were infographics like this. I kept blathering on about how much they could be considered comics. I said one girl’s work was basically a hieroglyphic, and one guy’s work was like a Family Circus neighborhood map (I’m not sure he took that as a compliment).

I Googled Megan Jaegerman and couldn’t find anything else out about her. Anyone have any leads?

There was this job I had where I was working at a place called XPLANE, which was an illustration company that did these visual explanation things, and a lot of times that amounted to these diagrammatic/comics illustrations. That really got me interested in diagrams. And after thinking for a while about diagrams, the stories that I did while I worked there have a lot of diagrams in them, and that carried on through. I started collecting old science textbooks and so forth that had these nice illustrated diagrams. It made me realize that since I was in high school and Understanding Comics came out, I’ve always thought about the comics form. And something I started realizing recently is that we talk about comics being a mixture of image and text, but it really seems to me that a part of the way comics works is in this sort of diagrammatic space. You have a pictorial space, which follows certain pictorial norms, and then you have the text part of comics, which follows the syntactical structure of text and language. What comics does is it has this particular way of diagramming those things together using the panel unit and the word balloon as symbols for certain things. I really realized that that was the part of comics that appealed to me the most. When I look at other cartoonists, I think that they’re real pictorial cartoonists. They’re really interested in the image part of comics. And there are other cartoonists who are really interested in stories and the subjects we associate with literary storytelling like character, plot and so on. I realized the thing that interested me in comics is the way all of that stuff is diagrammed on the page and the way that you read it.”

- Kevin Huizenga, interview

Links:

• Kevin’s Site
• Kevin’s blog

This comic is by Ellen Forney. It’s part of her excellent collection, I Love Led Zeppelin, which you should read.

At the moment I’m really interested in comics’ potential for integrating fictional and non-fictional elements into one narrative. For example, if you were writing a short story about a hand surgeon, it’s hard to imagine reading paragraphs about the intricacies and fine points of reattaching digits without falling asleep. But with comics, it seems totally reasonable that something like the above might be part of a larger story, seemlessly integrated, and really engaging. (I should note that this is a standalone page, and NOT part of a larger narrative. But if COULD be.)

More on this later, maybe. In the meantime, check out Ellen’s blog.

Didn’t realize I was plagarizing Scott McCloud with the brain-to-brain image in the bottom right of my previous comics/information design mind map. Guess it’s one of those things that drills itself into your subconcious…

Something to consider:

“What is art not? Well, as I’ve described it, Art is not about communication. Art is not a way of conveying information. It’s a way of understanding information. That is, creating a work of art is a means we have of making sense of the world, focusing to make it clearer, not a way of communicating some understanding of the world that we already hold. If you already hold a clear understanding of whatever then there’s no reason to create the work of art. So you don’t. In fact, you can’t. If you are trying to demonstrate some fact pictorially this is called illustration. Illustration is superficial, no matter how skilled, because it is secondary. The idea comes first and the illustration explicates it.”

- James Kochalka, “The Horrible Truth About Comics,” in THE CUTE MANIFESTO