Ever four years (yes I know they’ll start on the new one in about a week) elections enter our lives bringing with them many things including constant tv, radio, newspaper ads and bitter family debates. Most of the election baggage is annoying but for designers there is one huge bonus, a slew of beautiful well thought out infographics. Oh beautiful infographics, ever need inspiration?, look no further. These sets of complex and dense sets of data are beautiful when done well and nauseating when not. The rise of the interactivity of the web has the ability to take infographics to eleven. While the presidential election is finally the graphics are still being pumped out for retrospective views or ongoing races/recounts (someday MN will have a senator). Below is a list of nice graphics I’ve come across this time around.

New York Times: Always a source of inspiration they’ve had some particularily good ones this year.

New York Times Election Results Page

Obama Speech, McCain Speech

Electoral Shifts

Milestones of Barack Obama

Milestone of John McCain

Dissecting the Changing Electorate

you can go here for more from the New York Times

Washington Post:

this one is really detailed Election Winners by County

Good: While not always non-partisan their graphics are always good.

The First 100 Days: Time line of the first 100 days of every president since FDR.

Voters Guide

It’s the Economy, Stupid!

Again this is just a short list of the good info design that we’ve been treated to. if you know of others post them in the comments to share with all. Here’s to the next four years.

Jonathan Harris is a story teller. In the tradition of the best story tellers he uncovers glimpses of life, and allows you to reconstruct the rest. You can hear him speak about his work at TED Dec 2007 here or here. His now old project We Feel Fine or his more recent The Whale Hunt are beautiful examples of information design. The different ways in which he handles data, whether it is the data points emulating the weather or using metadata to create a timeline, are both engaging and beautiful.

But while inspiring, this is not the most important lesson of his work. The important aspect of his work is the reminder that good information design goes farther than aesthetics and readability. Good information design engages it’s audience with a story.

The See Conference is a conference on information design, from their website: “Our world is growing increasingly complex, dynamic and multi-dimensional. And so is our communication. The see conference is dedicated to new approaches that are being developed in the fields of design, art, architecture, multimedia and economy to confront this complexity and to transform the immense flood of information into useable knowledge.” Additionally they have posted videos from the mot recent conference in April. So head on over and learn something.

It’s a little dated by now, but Smashing Magazine posted a gallery of Data Visualization and Infographics . It is filled with tons of good examples including work from GOOD Magazine and Megan Jaegerman. There is some really brilliant stuff there so take a look and get inspired.

The new site Infodesignpatterns.com is probably one of the most useful sites online. Created by Christian Behrens to accompany his Master’s thesis from FH Potsdam. On this site he has collected a large variety of information design patterns, with explanations, layouts and real-world examples. Additionally he has created a pattern search which allows you to search by order, goal, type or dimensions. Playing with the search allows you to come up with numerous ideas for information design solutions. Hopefully he’ll release the companion book soon.