Hasta La Ideas

The winners of this year’s Information is Beautiful Awards were announced at a ceremony in London last night, with a motion graphics project mapping the solar system and a graphic representation of Nobel Prize winners’ academic qualifications among the winners. We’ll be covering the subject in more detail in our January issue, but here’s a round-up of the top projects…

Founded last year by data journalist and information designer David McCandless in partnership with data and research agency Kantar, the awards are divided into five categories: data visualisation, infographic, interactive visualisation, motion infographic and tool or website.

There are also six special awards for the best studio, individual contribution, student work, community project, corporate work and the entry deemed the most beautiful. Winners of each award receive a share of the $25,000 prize money.

Entries were judged by a panel chaired by McCandless and Kantar creative director Aziz Cami. Judges included John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design; Eric Rodenbeck and George Oates from San Francisco studio Stamen, London-based data designer Stefanie Posavec and CR’s Patrick Burgoyne. Votes were also submitted online by members of the public.

The winners

Data visualisation
Gold: Nobels, No Degrees (top) by Accurat, visualising the academic qualifications of Nobel Prize Winners since 1901 and the colleges they went to.

Silver: How to win an Oscar, a brilliant chart which extrapolates the ingredients for guaranteed Oscar success from the details of previous winners, by Christian Tate for Delayed Gratification

Bronze: Emoto Installation, Moritz Stefaner & Drew Hemment, Studio NAND, visualising the global response to the 2012 Olympic Games on Twitter

Infographic
Gold: Global Warning, Derek Kim, a fantastically detailed walk through the unfolding of the financial crisis

Silver: The 39 Stats: Charting Hitchcock’s Obsessions, Adam Frost, Zhenia Vasiliev (view the full infographic here)

Bronze: Why Health Care is so expensive, Heather Jones

Interactive Visualisation
Gold: Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bloomberg Visual Data, an endlessly fascinating deep-dive into the world’s wealthiest people

Silver: Listen to Wikipedia, Stephen LaPorte, Mahmoud Hashem. Sound is a neglected facet of data visualisation. This project assigns different tones to edits of Wikipedia creating a strangely beautiful soundscape

Bronze: U.S. Gun Deaths, by Periscopic – A fascinating and depressing overview of those killed by firearms in America

Motion Infographic

Gold: The Solar System: Our Home in Space, Philipp Dettmer, Stephan Rether, Cathrin Ziegler, Thomas Veith

Silver: New York City Carbon Emissions, Adam Nieman, Chris Rabet

Bronze: BBC Knowledge DNA Explainer, Territory

Tool or Website

Gold: Infogram, Uldis Leiterts, Raimonds Kaze, Alise Semjonova

Silver: GED Viz: Visualizing Global Economic Relations, Jan Arpe

Bronze: Dataseed, Dataseed

Special awards

Studio Award
Accurat

Best Individual Contributions
Mapping the comics character universe – Character Kingdom, Tim Leong, taken from his book, Super Graphic (read our blog post on the book here).

Valerio Pellegrini, Atlas of Kant’s Legacy – a streamgraph charting  the evolution of Kantian lexicon throughout his philosophical publications.

Student Awards

Here I Go Again, Jacob Hagen – a project mapping Hagen’s daily habits in intricate detail.

Meteorites 1900-2000, Kim Albrecht

Corporate Award

McKinsey Global Institute for Urban World – an iOS app containing a huge amount of data on the populations of the cities of the world

Community Award

Politicians’ Salaries & Income Inequality, by Ahmad Barclay, Joumana Al Jabri, Naji El Mir, Ramzi Jaber and Zahraa Mortada

Most Beautiful Award

Billionaires – Bloomberg Visual Data

For more info about the awards or to see the full short list, visit informationisbeautifulawards.com