Gods of the visual essay

visual essay
essay
info design
Published

November 29, 2023

I enjoy explaining things. There’s an incredible sense of satisfaction that comes from taking a complicated idea and simplifying it into easily digestible bits that anyone can understand. But it’s not easy. Trying to explain something to someone is a great way to find out if you actually understand it yourself.

You can bet if Euclid could write Javascript he would have made interactive essays instead of scratching out diagrams on papyri.

Explaining something well requires creativity. Explaining is an art. Like all arts, people who do it well make it look easy. But that apparent ease hides all the work they have done to deeply understand a subject.

I want to celebrate some of the people who are great at using the web to explain stuff, and see what I can learn from them.

Updated Nov 2023 with Ralph Ammer and Allie Brosh.

Tim Urban

Tim Urban is definitely a visual essay god. He takes complex ideas and synthesizes them into simple visual concepts. His new book What’s our problem? is a masterpiece of visual explanation.

Tim Urban

What can I learn from Urban? His drawings are actually fairly crappy. What makes them great is the concepts he conveys with them. He introduces concepts by making them into characters, and builds his arguments step by step by having those characters do stuff and interact, creating amusing little stories that convey difficult concepts. It’s brilliant. Of course the seemingly simple explanations hide a huge amount of thought and research. So my main takeaway is — don’t worry too much about the quality of the illustrations in a visual essay, concentrate on the story and the overall idea synthesis.

Some of my favorite Tim Urban visual essays:

Bartosz Ciechanowski

Bartosz Ciechanowski creates interactive essays about physics, mathematics and engineering. He only does three or four each year and each one is a flawless masterpiece. The pages are completely hand-coded. He is the polar opposite to Urban when it comes to illustration — his drawings are precise and mechanical.

Bartosz Ciechanowski

What can I learn from Ciechanowski? In some ways his work is just too perfect. It’s something to admire rather than to try to emulate. The time and dedication it takes to do this kind of work is just not something I have available.

Examples of his amazing work: * Bicycle * Sound
* Mechanical Watch
* GPS

Ralph Ammer

I like simplicity. One of the attractions of visual essays is explaining complex things in a simple way. Ralpha Ammer does this with essays including little animated drawing. His latest use what I call the “Roobarb and custard” technique (after a cartoon of my childhood) — simply alternating between two hand-drawn images of the same thing.

Ralph Ammer

Some of Ralph’s visual essays:

Nicky Case

Creating interactive explanations is hard. You need to be both good at programming and creative, which is an uncommon combination. There’s only one person I know who can do that and be funny. Nicky Case is one of a kind.

Nicky Case

Nicky Case has designed and developed a great many interactive explanations which brilliantly use interactivity to explore difficult subjects. They are eccentric, funny, and very clever.

Some of Nicky’s work:

Randall Munroe

Randall Munroe is a very clever guy. He has a great web comic called xkcd that he has published regularly since 2006. He also has a series of amazing visual essays called What if?, in which he answers questions that have been sent to him. The questions are often bizarre, and the answers are often unexpected and illuminating. Here are a few examples:

Alex Munroe

What can I learn from Munroe? Like Tim Urban, his drawings are actually fairly crappy. Also like Urban he uses characters to support and add humor to his textual explanations, and create a storyline or running jokes through an essay.

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram has an enormous head (metaphorically speaking) and a massive brain. He is undeniably brilliant. He is also wonderful at explaining extremely complex mathematic in long visual essays. The visuals are often generated by using the amazing Wolfram™ Mathematica software, written in the Wolfram™ programming language, both products of his wonderful huge head. Here are some examples of Wolfram™ visual essays:

Stephen Wolfram

What can I learn from Wolfram? I like the way his essays are just very long, linear ramblings without headings, and sprinkled with images of all different sizes.

Maggie Appleton

Maggie Appleton writes essays with lovely explanatory visuals. I was in two minds about whether to include her — many of her essays only include a single explanatory visual — but I like the way she organizes her essays, so she’s in.

Maggie Appleton

One thing I can learn from Maggie is to put essays into different categories. She uses a gardening analogy - “Budding” for draft essays, “Evergreen” for complete essays, “Seedling” for first drafts/new ideas. Also she tags her essays. I should do that.

Some of Maggie’s work:

Allie Brosh

Allie Brosh creates crazy, funny, insightful visual essays with distinctive crappy drawings. The crappyness is part of the charm. They wouldn’t be as amusing if they weren’t so crappy.

Allie Brosh

The style of the drawings reflects the anaric dialogue of the essays. I think her essays on depression are particularly good.

Some of Allie’s work:

Final thoughts

It’s hard to believe that the Web has been around for over three decades. With this amazing technology, anyone can share their thoughts and ideas with the world for free. And yet despite its tremendous potential for learning and education, we have only just begun to tap into its possibilities. It’s easy to create pages combining text, images, animations, video, music and interactive elements, but there are so few people and fewer organizations that are embracing all the new the creative possibilities.