David McCandless, Brighton Dome

David McCandless gave the organizers of the Brighton Festival a surprise. Given that the evening is a talk by a data journalist, rather than the latest, hot rock band riding into town, the intention was to keep things small scale, certain sections of seating in the 1700 capacity Dome Concert Hall closed off. However, as it turned out, the event sold out completely, with a long, snaking queue outside the ticket office hoping in vain for returns.

McCandless (right), after all, is really rather more than just an info geek – although, as he continually points out, he is that as well. His blog and later book Information is Beautiful has quietly become the coffee table tome du jour, a compendium of graphics that visually - and artistically – illustrate everything from the relationship between a dictator’s facial hair and their body count, to the remaining world supplies of non-renewable resources. It has led to him designing work for Tate Britain, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and others. Even pre-gig suppositions that he might prove to be a mumbling nerd rambling on about numbers, unable to captivate a large concert venue, are way off the mark.

McCandless, a goatee-bearded figure in white trousers, grey elbow-patched jacket, lumberjack shirt and brown brogues with bright blue laces, is immediately, unassumingly at ease on stage. His show relies on him remotely controlling a laptop that beams images and animations onto a screen and, of course, he’s utterly comfortable with such technology. Even when he fumbles, can’t remember where he’s at, he smooths things over fine. He leads us straight into visuals created from mined masses of data. The primary focus of many is illustrating global disparities and/or smashing media myths. An animated game of “Debtris” places oil profits beside African debt, a “fear index” shows the cycles of news scares, how they all drop away around 9/11 when everyone truly had something more to worry about than whether video games might damage young minds.

McCandless is also an evangelist. There’s a very T.E.D. vibe about his hour long chat, with a pinch of Steve Jobs’ precision salesmanship. “Data,” he says, “is the new soil,” and he tells us we can all get amongst it. His work, he reckons, helps people see truths – “the language of the eye” - and, in doing so, gives insights into opposing opinions, bridging long held biases. Certainly, I had no idea that China’s army, so often touted as massive and threatening, is actually 124^th in the world in terms of ratio to the size of the nation itself. The evening is full of such stuff and McCandless is right, it’s a great way to learn.

There are laughs to be had too. The reaction when a series of maps showcases Britain and Australia as the top consumers of almost every leisure drug was more akin to cocky laughter than horror. He ends with a quiz, where we have to guess what certain spikes represent on his graphs. I won’t spoil it by telling the answers but suffice to say it’s more fun than you might imagine guessing whether “cool” is now a more popular word than “awesome”, and other such conundrums. McCandless is akin to the hip teacher that every school has, yet there's nothing smug about him. The transparency in his eagerness to share his, often brilliant, ideas makes time passed in his company both stimulating and enjoyable.

Brighton Festival website

David McCandless's Information is Beautiful website

Overleaf: Watch David McCandless's T.E.D. talk, The Beauty of Data Visualization