Infographic Mania: The Week In Extremely Digestible Data

The Creators Project likes to keep its eyes on the excess of infographics floating around the web, though there are often so many out there that singling one out as extraordinary feels like a misstep (though, it's worth noting that the handmade pie graphs from The Hairpin are always gold).

This week, however, there was such a swath of epic graphs that we can't help but share a few. From The Evolution of Reddit, to BBC's Timeline Of The Far Future, these are the week's best visualizations of information. Just make sure to check the key before getting lost in all the statistical glory.

Illustrator and graphic designer, Marcelo Duhalde, made an infographic that again proves people in Asia and Northern Europe live longer (on average) than everyone else in the world. The Atlantic re-published the infographic and highlighted some of the more interesting details, including that the average lifespan of someone in the US is 79.

Here are some close-ups of the chart, but you can also see it in extreme detail here.

The BBC has a whole subsection on infographics, teeming with juicy, scalable facts about the past, present, future, and now: far, far future. Published this week, The Timeline of the Far Future includes predictions going as far as one hundred quintillion years from now--a number so mind-boggling that it's almost absurd to see it written on a graph.

There are some unbelievable ideas on this one, including a guarantee that if the Earth is not consumed by a swollen sun in 5.4 billion years, then our planet's orbit will definitely decay at the 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 mark. No point in arguing with this theory, mankind is set to be eradicated 5 million years from now. Oh well…

Yesterday, Gizmodo published an article that included excerpts from Fritz Kahn, a new book about the multi-disciplinary German intellectual, who many claim invented the infographic. Kahn was a doctor, illustrator, and biologist who used infographics to explain his theories about human anatomy, such as the nervous system.

Kahn was making infographics years after phrenology illustrations (pseudo-scientific drawings of the human brain), were in circulation, though. Phrenological drawings may not have real "info" but they could arguably be tied into the origin of the infographic.

Computer Science graduate student, Randal Olson, has blessed the web with an infographic about a site full of infographics. Using the number of posts that users have submitted to each subreddit, he made a the above chart, proving that Redditers love discussing animals more than ever.

Though this graph is from this past spring, it made the Internet rounds again this week, including a featured spot on Cool Infographic's site. Olson also wrote a piece for FastCoDesign this week about how to spot a faulty infographic. So when you're digging through Reddit for infographics about Reddit (something that meta can probably be found on r/WoahDude), now you know how to separate the good graphs for the phony fluff.

The scalability is too much! What are some other epic infographics that you've seen online recently? Share with us in the comments. The more cheese infographics, the better.

@zachsokol