The Creative Review blog reports on a new poster show (‘Painting by Numbers‘) for early 2012 at the London Transport Museum which will be exhibiting some vintage data visualisations from the 1930s onwards.
The works relate to a number of designs which were used to present the quality and benefits of using London’s public transport.
Often thought of as a 21st century phenomenon, data visualisation – the presentation of information abstracted into a visual form – has been in use since the 2nd century when Egyptian people used tables to organise astronomical information. It was not until the 1920s that the importance and power of data visualisation for examining and making sense of data and information became more widely used.
The exhibition includes 20 posters from the artists such as Hans Schleger, Theyre Lee-Elliott and James Fitton and runs from the 6th January to 18th March 2012. You can by replicas of the posters from the London Transport Museum’s own poster collection shop.
(Acknowledging @Periscopic for spotting it first!)