I just finished a forty minute conversation with Stefanie Posavec on Skype. Stefanie has graciously accepted to be one of the interviewees in The Functional Art. I believe her insights will be extremely relevant for all readers. They provide some contrast to what is being said by other professionals I am going to write about, that usually have backgrounds on engineering, cognitive sciences, and journalism.
Stefanie's approach to visualization lies at the convergence of art and purely functional graphics. According to her own words, she doesn't define herself as an 'information designer', but as a 'data illustrator'. Still, her projects are awe-inspiring. The ones I like the most (and the ones that I am planning to include in the book) are Literary Organism, a paragraph-by-paragraph visualization of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and Six Editions, a collection of color wheels displaying the changes and edits On the Origin of Species went through during Charles Darwin's lifetime. Believe me, you will be amazed when you find out how those projects came about. They are examples of the incredible results you can get with a low-tech (rather than algorithmic-based) approach to visualization.
