Information is Beautiful

It's fair to say the NCVO Research Team has a bit of a teenage crush at the moment. The object of our affections is David McCandless, an information designer based in London.

You might have seen his website Information is Beautiful or seen his visualisations in the Guardian, if you haven't I really recommend a look. We're in the business of presenting information in a succint and interesting way, and so his ideas (and those of many other people) have been really useful as inspiration for how we create the next Almanac.

Some of my favourites include If Twitter was 100 People and the Billion Pound O Gram. Not all of the visualisations work, some end up obscuring or confusing the message rather than enhancing it, but the best visualisations provide valuable new insights into old data.

For the 2010 edition of the Almanac (released in April), we've tried to think differently about how we present our data, and what we think the data is saying about the state of civil society. I won't reveal too much but we're very pleased with the results so far. We hope the teenage crush hasn't gone too far though, the Almanac will include the usual data tables and analysis that allow you to pick the most useful statistics and use them in your work.