Someone needs to get me a paper copy of Willard Cope Brinton's Graphic Presentation (1939), because it is awesome. Brinton discusses various forms of graphic presentation in the 524-page book and what works and what doesn't. There's also some good stuff in there about how to make your graphs, charts, maps, etc (by hand). Have we seen these? The most interesting part is that many of the graphics - despite having no computers in 1939 - look a lot like what we have today. Albeit, they're a little rougher because they're made by hand, but that's just added flavor. For example, you've got the Sankey diagram above, or a "cosmograph" as Brinton calls it. The instructions read: One thousand strips of paper are set on edge to represent 100% and are separated into component parts of 100%. What? You want me to arrange 1,000 strips of paper to make my diagram? Brilliant, I say. Here are your choropleth maps...

network diagram...

and of course some of your usual suspects...

The entire book is freely available in PDF format, but it's low resolution and takes forever to browse. Michael Stoll has posted some higher quality shots on Flickr. I still want more though. Seriously, does anyone know where I can get a copy? [via Datavisualization.ch]

This graphic on religious teachings and sex is making the social media rounds. The source is questionable and the design is a little iffy, but oh what the heck, it's Friday. Have a nice weekend all. [Thanks, Brian]

This graphic, from Mike Arauz, describes different levels of online friendship, starting at passive interest (read your blog but not much else) up to investment (deeply care about your success). I originally thought it was just one of those comic infographics, but there's some good discussion going on in the comments of the original post and the Arauz' response. [Thanks, @JeffHurt]

Designers seem to have taken a liking to the idea of showing world statistics as a village of 100. For example, if the world were a village of 100 people, 48 of them would be men. While we're essentially just looking at percentages, the village metaphor seems to do a better job at humanizing the numbers. Along the same lines, this poster series from Tony Ng, World of 100, uses simple graphics to relate to demographics like money, food, and computers: This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people. There are a few different versions of this text in circulation about the world’s statistics. I found the data very striking and neatly summarises the world that we live in. So I used information graphics to re-tell the story in another creative way. A few of the graphics seem kind of random, but hey, it's amusing. [via The Daily Dish]