Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Paperback
$7.59

$7.59 with 62 percent savings

List Price: $20.00

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, May 17 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 13 hrs 59 mins

Select delivery location

Only 3 left in stock - order soon.

$$7.59 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon

Ships from

Amazon

Sold by

Pearlzone

Sold by

Pearlzone

Returns

30-day easy returns

Returns

30-day easy returns

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (81) from $1.72 + $3.98 shipping

Follow the author

Gareth Cook

+ Follow

More books from this author

The Best American InfographicsMerchant Video

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

VIDEO

The Best American Infographics 2013 (The Best American Series ®) Paperback – October 8, 2013

by Gareth Cook (Editor), David Byrne (Introduction)

4.3 69 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$7.59","priceAmount":7.59,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"7","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"59","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"qiFumEy0giXHn1hseEHdnelzSDVteyJvrbBhAlbPNPfqfVYc26UiI%2FPVtycum9k2uNARX8eIEwBohdPI8k8kWLrrUyeKlyj9iV104yRZE%2BkiOQEPfKe8%2BLEGs82JUXusM93YyFFSh4beRH9y21wPWBmb7j3E%2BqO6u6UiOoDsjtUBoIG%2Bb2xNpJtqONxBlFCy","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

The rise of infographics across virtually all print and electronic media—from a striking breakdown of classic cocktails to a graphic tracking 200 influential moments that changed the world to visually arresting depictions of Twitter traffic—reveals patterns in our lives and our world in fresh and surprising ways. In the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics provide us with quick, often influential bursts of art and knowledge—on the environment, politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more—to digest, to tweet, to share, to go viral.

The Best American Infographics captures the finest examples from the past year, including the ten best interactive infographics, of this mesmerizing new way of seeing and understanding our world.

Frequently bought together

The Best American Infographics 2013 (The Best American Series ®)

$7.59

Get it as soon as Friday, May 17

Only 3 left in stock - order soon.

Sold by Pearlzone and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.

+

$21.36

Get it as soon as Monday, May 20

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Sold by Shakespeare Book House and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.

+

The Best American Infographics 2016 (The Best American Series ®)

$17.74

Get it as soon as Friday, May 17

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Sold by R.J Books and ships from Amazon Fulfillment.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

Gareth Cook
46
Paperback
54 offers from $1.81
Gareth Cook
38
Paperback
48 offers from $2.29
Gareth Cook
56
Paperback
49 offers from $2.20
Jonathan Schwabish
348
Paperback
63 offers from $24.32

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Not only is it a thing of beauty it’s also a good read, with thoughtful explanations of each winning graphic and an entertaining forward by David Byrne."
—Nature

From the Back Cover

The rise of infographics across virtually all print and electronic media from a striking breakdown of classic cocktails to a graphic tracking 200 influential moments that changed the world to visually arresting depictions of Twitter traffic reveals patterns in our lives and our world in fresh and surprising ways. In the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics provide us with quick, often influential bursts of art and knowledge on the environment, politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more to digest, to tweet, to share, to go viral.

The Best American Infographics captures the finest examples from the past year, including the ten best interactive infographics, of this mesmerizing new way of seeing and understanding our world.

About the Author

Series editor GARETH COOK is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and the editor of Mind Matters, Scientific American's neuroscience blog. He helped invent the Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section and served as its editor from 2007 to 2011. His work has also appeared on NewYorker.com and in Wired, Scientific American, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

DAVID BYRNE is a renowned artist, the force behind the Talking Heads and creator of the highly regarded record label Luaka Bop. He is a photographer, film director, and author.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction by David Byrne What a thrill and pleasure it was to be asked to write this introduction. I love these infographic things, and welcomed the excuse to think about them some more. I was not a judge in this selection, but I spent a good few days examining many infographics that did and didn’t make it into the final selected group — some of the best of which are interactive and some of the others designed for broadsheet newspapers with their giant pages or four-page foldouts in glossy magazines. Despite the change in context, you’ll be able to make sense of most of the wonderful work going on in this odd corner of the workplace, where assignments to include a lot of information battle it out with a publication’s available space, printing specs, web technology, and deadlines. The very best of these, in my opinion, engender and facilitate an insight by visual means — allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece — when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there’s an instant "Aha!" — we can see how income affects or at least correlates with, for example, folks’ levels of education. Or, less expectedly, we might, for example, see how rainfall seems to have a profound effect on consumption of hard liquor (I made that part up). What we can get in this medium is the instant revelation of a pattern that wasn’t noticeable before. Many infographics here spark insights, and they do so super quickly. The interactive "Road to Victory," for example, allows one to see Obama’s odds against Romney — how Romney had many more options to lose, given the decision tree of possible wins and losses in various states. Surprising us with before-unseen clarity is the kind of thing this medium can sometimes do far better than any other. Sometimes a picture or graphic is indeed worth 1,000 words. Sometimes a graphic is merely a replacement for those words, and sometimes it’s an oversized dingbat, merely visually breaking up the blocks of text on the printed or web page. When infographics work, and many of these in Best American Infographics 2013 do, they take you somewhere no other medium can go; they allow and facilitate intuitive insights; and they reveal the hidden patterns buried in mountains of data. The graphic nature of these pieces helps them function as metaphors. Democrats become blue shapes and Republicans red ones. Pop songs are an aqua wedge-shaped snake. I get that. We have an inbuilt ability to manipulate visual metaphors in ways we cannot do with the things and concepts they stand for — to use them as malleable, conceptual Tetris blocks or modeling clay that we can more easily squeeze, stack, and reorder. And then — whammo! — a pattern emerges, and we’ve arrived someplace we would never have gotten to by any other means.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (October 8, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 184 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0547973373
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0547973371
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.5 x 9.88 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,344,287 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,669 in Pop Culture Art
- #4,419 in Communication & Media Studies
- #4,665 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences

Customer Reviews:
4.3 69 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Gareth Cook

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Gareth Cook is a Pulitzer Prize-winning magazine journalist, a contributor to NewYorker.com, and the editor of a forthcoming book series, The Best American Infographics. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, NewYorker.com, Wired, Scientific American, the Washington Monthly, the Boston Globe Ideas section and elsewhere. He is also editor of Scientific American’s Mind Matters neuroscience blog.

Gareth began his career in Washington, DC with writing and editing jobs at The Washington Monthly, Foreign Policy, and U.S. News & World Report. In 1996 he moved to Boston to become the news editor of The Boston Phoenix and then, in 1999, joined the Boston Globe. He was one of the founders of the Globe’s Sunday Ideas section and then served as its editor from 2007 to 2011. He was the Globe’s science reporter for seven years, and also worked as an editor on the city desk.

In 2005, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “explaining, with clarity and humanity, the complex scientific and ethical dimensions of stem cell research.” In 2005, he was also the winner of a National Academies Communications Award and the Wood’s Hole Ocean Science Journalism Award. His writing has appeared in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008, The Human Face of Big Data, and A Field Guide for Science Writers.

Gareth graduated from Brown University with degrees in International Relations and Mathematical Physics. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts with his wife, Amanda, and their two boys.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5

69 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Jane Jetson

If This Headline Were an Infographic--You Would Understand it Immediately

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2014

Verified Purchase

Infographics are a good way to convey complex information in a way that is memorable. Although I love graphs and other visuals, I do believe that Infographics are an important step in breaking through the clutter of digital and non-digital communication.

While the infographics in this book are sometimes shown in a reduced size (making the print/pictures tiny) as others have said, I believe that you can still get the inspiration needed to communicate in a new way. I can still recall that the Shar-Pei is more closely related to the wolf than is the German Shepherd. These are among the most detailed infographics I have seen---so the style may be more for the data hounds among us (no pun intended).

If you are looking for a book to show you how to take complex informaiton and show it in "3 steps" (another important type of infographic), this is not the book that will serve that purpose, in my opinion. That said, I am glad I have this at hand to serve as inspiration.

Helpful

Fred Prinz

Good Compliation But Some Graphics Are Shrink-to-Fit

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2013

Verified Purchase

I liked this book very much as I am a visual person and anytime I can look at a picture instead of reading a text I will jump at the opportunity. I give the book four stars for the overall beauty of the designs and also for the very informative Forward by Gareth Cook and Introduction by David Byrne. Please read both the Forward and Introduction as they are very illuminating.The designs range from the powerfully simple (Gun Ownership Rates by Country – pp. 86-89) to the very complex (Political Moneyball – pp. 144-145) and are divided into three sections: You, Us, and The Material World. There is also a separate section for the Top 10 Interactive Graphics (selected by Eric Rodenbeck).

I reserve giving the fifth star because some of the infographics are reduced to such a small size as to be virtually unreadable. Even accounting for the massive size of Influence: A Brief History (pp. 54-59) by extending it into a fold-out page, the size of the type remains extremely small. As a graphic, it’s beautiful; as information, it’s useless.

I also reduced my rating to four stars because the interactive section never defines that term although Mr.Rodenbeck hints at a definition by referring to the ability to “pan and zoom.” What makes a graphic interactive? I take it to mean that these infographics must be viewed online in order to appreciate the way the variables interact with each other over time (pan and zoom?), but again, that is just my guess. Being what it is, a static medium with a limited physical dimension, the book freezes the motion of the graphics and sometimes shrinks them to near illegibility (no zooming). To the book’s credit, a link is provided to the publisher’s website where these graphics may be seen in their interactive form.

For the rest of the “non-interactive” graphics that constitute the majority, while there are no direct links to them on the publisher’s website, each infographic includes its online reference. The few references I took the trouble to look up were still accessible even late in 2013. By the way, many of these online sources are “interactive.”

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Carri Craver

An Inspiring Cover to Cover Read

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2013

Verified Purchase

This lovely book was on the front porch as I returned home last night. It was 3 hours before I put it down.

There are some very well done data visualizations here. One in particular on a better food label was great on showing how to look at the information from a completely different perspective. And covers a broader range of data in a more succinct space. Loved it.

While at times the content of some specific data visualizations wasn't relevant to me, it didn't matter. The author did a great job of choosing such a diverse group of infographics to show. I was always drawn in to learn something about how I can better present things in my projects as a designer.

His choice for the star of the book was spectacular and informative. This book will be one that remains within reach when I struggling and need a jumping off point to decide how I will present data. Let's hope our future looks much more like this book and much less like an excel bar chart.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Daniel

Inspires me to make better graphs :D

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2017

Verified Purchase

Love this book!

I like the graphical representations!

As a researcher, I always tried to convey my research more effectively.

This book inspires me to think of creative and effective ways to convey information.

Some graphs are small and way too complicated but they are still useful.

I have not emulated any graphs yet but I look forward to doing so soon :D

Helpful

Amazon Customer

Poor Binding, a blemish on otherwise strong collection

Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2013

Verified Purchase

I found the actual content of the book both interesting and entertaining. I'm not an aficionado though,
so I can't speak to how well-known the chosen infographics might be to someone with more than a passing
interest in the subject.

I was however more than a little annoyed at the poor print setting. The binding of the book prevents it from
being opened wide enough to fully see the infographics that cross the center line. This meant that it was
difficult to impossible to read text that happened to cross over the center (is it called the gutter?).
I'd say this affected about 30% of the infographics and was annoying enough that I found myself wondering
how this kind of oversight could happen.

Sadly, I bought the physical version because the reviews on the kindle version say that the images are too
small to enjoy, so I can't even suggest that alternative.

When are publishers going to solve the problem of formatting image-heavy books for tablets and e-ink devices?

27 people found this helpful

Helpful

A Ampil

Great gallery to have around if you're into visual stories

Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2014

Verified Purchase

If you create and publish infographics at work like I do, you'll love this. I turn to this gallery to see if our work holds up in aesthetic appeal, information compression, and overall effect. This book was recommended by blogger Andrea Ovans on Harvard Business Review's blog network. Visualizing data is becoming a source of competitive advantage for businesses; just check out the HBR Insight Center (Persuading with data).

Now you know why I already have the 2014 edition on my pre-order list.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Jacopo F.

Molto bene!

Reviewed in Italy on October 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

Esattamente ciò che avevo ordinato, il prodotto è arrivato con un giorno di anticipo e nonostante lo scorporo delle spedizioni (2 anzichè 1) dello stesso ordine non ho avuto alcun problema e sono arrivati entrambi lo stesso giorno... 5 stelle!

Translate review to English

José Antonio

Infografías muy buenas

Reviewed in Spain on July 14, 2014

Verified Purchase

Este libro muestra unas infografías increibles e ingeniosas, y el libro tiene un diseño impecable.
Recomendado para las personas que se dedican a este oficio.

Translate review to English

See more reviews

Return this item for free

Follow the author

Image Unavailable