The Evolution of the Handgun

There have been literally thousands of different gun models, but The Evolution of the Handgun infographic from GunVault.com covers most of the major advancements in handgun design.

I really like the first two sections of this design, and I think the last section was unnecessary.  The timeline and the gun specifications sections do a good job of laying out the data and keeping it simple.  The barrel length and the calibers of each model work very nicely.  Since the # of Rounds data is quantitative, I would suggest visualizing that as a series of circles instead of a solid bar to better communicate quantity.  

The last section adds a lot of text, repeats the data from the second section and makes the overall infographic gratuitously long.  The flags showing the country of origin could easily have been added to the earlier sections.

Thanks to Archie for sending in the link!

Ingeniously Charting The Horrifying Power of Today's Nuclear Bombs

Anyone remember what color the “tons” were on the infographic?  The Ingeniously Charting The Horrifying Power of Today’s Nuclear Bombs infographic by Maximilian Bode (posted on fastcodesign.com) puts the power of the Tsar bomb into painful perspective (but seriously my fingers hurt from scrolling). 

A simple, but great design that puts some truly huge numbers into scale for the reader to understand.

Update on Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 6:33PM by Randy

Images combined into one large JPG file by Randy Blackford, who provided this image on Pinterest.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus [video]

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus is a video that claims to be a “motion infographic.”  Created by Patrick Clair, it explores some of the information that has emerged as people have been dissecting the Stuxnet computer virus.

An infographic dissecting the nature and ramifications of Stuxnet, the first weapon made entirely out of code.

I really like the idea of motion infographics, but I disagree that moving text and animation make this an infographic.  There is a lot of information, but there aren’t any data visualizations.  There were a couple of animations that looked like data visualizations, but they’re vague and don’t convey any data to the viewer.

I really like the video, the topic of weaponized software is fascinating and the Security Now podcast #291 has a really good explanation of what has been publicly learned about the virus.

Question for everyone reading: “Does informative = infographic?”

Direction and Motion Graphics: Patrick Clair patrickclair.com
Written by: Scott Mitchell

Found on Visual News

The video is now also available on YouTube: