The New York Times’ impressive infographics

I’m continually impressed with The New York Times. Not only for its journalistic writing, but especially for its well-designed infographics.

The Times’ recent coverage of Bush’s State of the Union address features two superb pieces of information design. One shows the relationship between applause and speech length for each address over the past seven years. The other, an interactive infographic, compares the number of times certain words appear in the address. Both are a nice example of how information design can give readers more ways to evaluate and contextualize a given text or set of data.

It’s great to see a newspaper pay as much attention to information design as it does to its writing, typography, and photography. Hopefully, it’ll offer inspiration to budding information designers. I can hear it now, “Mommy, I want to design charts and graphs when I grow up.”