Like most of us, the team behind design giant Pentagram have found the events of 2020 to be a little overwhelming. With difficult news arriving almost daily, creatives Giorgia Lupi, Ting Fang Cheng, Talia Cotton, Phil Cox, and Sarah Kay Miller decided to look for the positive in a growing haystack of cold, hard facts. Together they launched Happy Data, as a way to spotlight the human side of statistics, and visualise the “small but mighty numbers” that could help us picture a new reality post-pandemic, as well as keep us inspired in the midst of a racial justice crisis.
Combining data with drawings and photographs collected from the public, the resulting infographics are heartwarming, surprising and encouraging. “We wanted to be as wide-ranging as possible in the types of data we visualised,” explained Lupi and Cox in a recent interview. “The one uniting factor is that all the data is publicly available or, in a way, ‘hiding in plain sight’. While more depressing statistics tend to dominate the headlines, we wanted to spotlight stories which are still happening out in the world and being reported on, even if we don’t always notice them.”
View all of the visuals on the Happy Data website.
