Best Infographics of 2013

From lame to informative, infographics for some are SEO positioning  tools.  Search engines see them as invasive spam.  Through the clutter there are some educative infographics that make the grade.  The Best American Infographics 2013 by Gareth Cook gathers the best of the crop.

Infographics, short for information graphics, are organizations of data about any one thing or many—and they often tell an interesting story along the way. They can be humorous (What Were the Gayest [And Straightest] Super Bowl Halftime Shows? by Tom Scocca), serious (The Money in Politics Navigator by Andrew Garcia Phillips), aesthetically beautiful (Wind Map by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg), or hard to face (Sexism Visualized by Brian McGill), but the best of them are useful and essential, and captured in this volume.

Gareth Cook first became aware of the singular power of a good infographic back when he was working as a science reporter for The Boston Globe in the early aughts. “I realized that in some cases, no matter what I did with words, I absolutely could not explain some things without visual help,” he says. “You can have many, many words and not get across what you can get across in an instant with an infographic.” He’s been fascinated with the things since. Recently, he got the chance to look at a good many of them.