Information wants to be aesthetically pleasing
I’m drawn maps, charts of activity and ideograms and find them beautiful even when they are documenting one man’s conspiracy mania.
Which brings me to information aesthetics, a “weblog is based on the assertion that information visualization can be enriched with the principles of creative design and art, to develop valuable data representations that address the emotional experience of users, instead of solely focusing on typical task effectiveness metrics” and stuff like that there.
And Andrew Vande Moere does a good job at finding some nice looking ones: example 1, example 2 and example 3. And then there’s the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River by Harold N. Fisk, 1944, which maps the ancient courses of the Mississippi River:
This is plate five of a fifteen plate set, all of which have been assembled into the stretch of the river(s) for your convenience right here.
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