Iconic Visionaries of Design — William Playfair
Examining The History of Infographics and Data Visualization
This series started with William Playfair. Yes, technically this is our fourth article, but Playfair is the Grand Daddy of Data Visualization. He started it all in 1786 and he did so with great style. His contributions, and there were many, set the stage for two and half centuries of progress.
Playfair was a Scottish engineer and inventor with a checkered life history and a flare for visual presentation. Playfair’s name is often paired with the word ‘scoundrel’, but then so was Han Solo. His career path and many of his business endeavors were clearly less than successful — but this article is about his visualization and design for more on his intriguing life, start here:
Plate, Plots, Publications, and Politics
Playfair did his work in a time of printing plates and quill pens. That is an important benchmark when considering his body of work. He introduced the world to line graphs and bar charts using innovative plots that he included in his 1786 Commercial and Political Atlas. Which is still an excellent reference:
While history if often more decisive than the actual facts, his work was truly original and revolutionary. Data Visualization was born and it was highly impressive. Incidentally, the high quality and character of his work encourages one to speculate that other less impressive tries may have preceded his work, but were relegated to history’s circular file.
Impressive & Inspiring
William utilized bar charts and line graphs, the latter a bit more impressively. These may seem like old hat today, but they top many similar charts proliferating the corporate world today.
He uses clear labels, clear call outs, and creates clear insight. He does use opportunistically large title blocks that fill otherwise unused (or unuseful) chart space — but remembering that he is working with a quill, probably a bit too critical.
A bit more deserved criticism would focus on the x-axis of the chart on the left. His time divisions are not uniform or fully representative. Perhaps he had little choice to provide enough space for his event labels, but bad practice regardless.
Playfair Began It All
He captured our imaginations and that was his intention all along. He was a man who brought life and imagination to statistic, geography, and political sciences that, at the time, lacked interest for most. Whether you agree with his politics, question his motives, or second guess his business decisions — what he did for analytics, education, and communication were truly revolutionary.
No study is less alluring or more dry and tedious than statistics, unless the mind and imagination are set to work, or that the person studying is particularly interested in the subject; which last can seldom be the case with young men in any rank of life. — William Playfair
