Information Graphics.

Information Graphics. Peter Wilbur and Michael Burke. New York: Thames & Hudson (800-233-4830, 1998. Illus., hardcover, 176 pp., $45.00.

The selection, organization and presentation of information through design is the intent and content of this sourcebook on information graphics. While directed toward a special area of the design profession, the excellent illustrations and topics chosen for discussion will expand the understanding of both students of design and the general public.

Beginning with that best-known example of historical graphic reporting, the eleventh century Bayeaux Tapestry, the two authors--an English designer and a German professor of graphic design--have organized a broad spectrum of ideas and contemporary design areas into six chapters that take us far beyond the desktop publishing efforts of the early 1990s into high-design nonverbal communication. Their first chapter, Informing the Traveller, examines the wide variety of map forms that confront today's traveller. An effort to simplify complex arrival and departure information graphically at each end of the channel tunnel between Dover, England and Calais, France is but one outstanding example of this process. Other chapter headings are: Interacting With The Screen, Exploring The 3D Interface, Explaining How Things Work, Controlling The Input, and Mapping the Internal and External Worlds.

In addition to the many photographs, charts, and diagrams in full color that extend the explanatory text, each chapter concludes with an in-depth case study detailing the research and development of a related concept or invention. This book should be of interest to design students from secondary school through college.