Useful Communication Starts with Useful Pictures

C. Minard's Depiction of Napoleon's Invasion of Moscow and Russia in 1812 and 1813

I recently finished reading Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin,” which is a great introductory and reference book on communicating with pictures.  I also spotted Seth Godin’s blog post commenting on this NYTimes post and its validity.  And last but not least, one of my favorite examples of multiple dimensions of data plotted on a single illustration is explained by Edward Tufte.  I mention all of these examples because it’s easy to make a bad picture, but not too hard to make a really good one.

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