home > book reviews > Manuel Lima
Google > Manuel Lima


Books

Books : reviews

Manuel Lima.
Visual Complexity: mapping patterns of information.
Princeton Architectural Press. 2011

Our ability to generate information now for exceeds our capacity to understand it. Finding patterns and making meaningful connections inside complex data networks has emerged as one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century. Designers, researchers, and scientists now employ an innovative mix of color, symbols, graphics, algorithms, and interactivity to clarity, and often beauty, what would otherwise be a clutter of data.

In Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, Manuel Lima collects and presents almost three hundred of the most compelling examples of information design—everything from representing networks of followers on Twitter and the eighty-five recorded covers of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” to depicting interconnections between members of the Al Qaeda network and interactions among proteins in a human cell, Lima also looks at the long tradition of mapping complex networks, offering the first book to integrate a thorough history of network visualization with an examination of the real-life situations from which these graphics ore generated.

Network visualization is the language of representation in today’s information-driven society. Visual Complexity explores and reveals the importance and impact of illustrations not only in understanding complex concepts but as the central driver for a new conception of beauty. With essays by prominent voices in the fields of network sciences and information visualization, Visual Complexity includes contributions by Christopher Kirwan, Nathan Yau, Andrew Vande Moere, and David McConville.

Manuel Lima.
The Book of Trees: visualizing branches of knowledge.
Princeton Architectural Press. 2014

The tree is a universal human symbol that transcends time and culture as a compelling metaphor for organizing knowledge. The Book of Trees, Manuel Lima’s follow-up volume to his critically acclaimed Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, explores more than eight hundred years of the tree diagram—from its roots in antiquity through the illuminated manuscripts of European cloisters to its current resurgence as an elegant and functional structure for representing complex information.

Lima presents almost two hundred intricately detailed illustrations on a remarkable variety of subjects, including medieval classifications of virtues and vices, an organization chart of the Manhattan Project, and a family tree of the X-Men. Innovative visualizations from leading contemporary designers bring clarity and beauty to data from biology, finance, sociology, sports, the arts, and the dense networks of digital ecosystems. A foreword by information design pioneer Ben Shneiderman rounds out this one-of-a-kind resource and compendium.