New York

London

Paris

Tokyo

Moscow

And finally, my local system, the relatively pathetic-looking San Francisco MUNI/BART system

See many more world subway systems at scale right here. Thanks to Adwait for the tip.

I recently ran across an amazing infographic at xkcd. I have summarized it below.

Detail of infographic by GOOD and Column Five Media

According to the United Nations, unsanitary water kills more people worldwide than war. As the precious water supply dwindles, it may prove to be more than just a crisis for developing countries.

Via, and by.

Ever since the recent Japanese Tsunami, I've been trying to think about whether graphic design efforts to generate donations to foreign disasters are good. (Spoiler: I haven't decided.)

In the process of thinking about it, though, I ran across a nice infographic from Good that has to do with U.S. Foreign Aid.

Here's the interesting thing. If I'm reading this infographic right, the average American thinks that the fed is spending a quarter out of every dollar in the federal budget on foreign aid, and he thinks it should spend a dime. In fact, the US spends roughly a penny out of every two dollars.

What does this mean? Isn't this the age of information?

Interest no. 6: "The focus of the interest deals with gang related crime and whether the Danes have changed behavior because of it."

Interest no.4: "The focus of the interest deals with whether or not the Danes think it's ethical to wear religious symbols in public professions."

Orntoff's Infographics project attempts to put data into context by using representative images.  I'd perhaps tweak the actual representation used to better match each data set (e.g. proportions are unclear in the second example) but the general concept is brilliant. See more images and more context at his site.

Steve Cable has created an nice infographic about the key design changes and innovation in game controller interfaces over time.

Getting this information together helped him make some neat observations about the design methodologies at Nintendo and Playstation.

Nintendo: Go big or go home

Nintendo takes a lot of risks: some work (the Wiimote), some don't (the Powerglove). Playstation plays it safer, making small changes to the design over time.

Interesting stuff. (Also make sure to check the comments for some debate about how good the research behind the graphic is.)

Take a look.

Once weekly, GOOD Magazine posts an infographic, or a "transparency", visualizing everything from the amount of our national acreage controlled by major retail chains (below) to the length of time people spend on popular email clients. They have now created a flickr archive of them all.

Student Debt: GOOD and Futurefarmers look at the ballooning student debt in the United States.

Retail Store Space: The biggest retailer in the world covers an area larger than Manhattan. GOOD and Futurefarmers look at "the amazing amount of space occupied by a few ubiquitous chains."