David McCandless

Why organisations work with David McCandless

• He built the language of modern editorial data visualisation through Information is Beautiful, the blog and three books that defined the form for a generation of journalists and designers.
• He co-founded the Information is Beautiful Awards in 2012 with Kantar’s Aziz Cami, the global benchmark prize for data visualisation, giving him a panoramic view of what works across thousands of submissions.
• His work has been published by The Guardian, Wired, and Die Zeit and exhibited at MoMA, Tate Britain, and the Wellcome Trust gallery, evidence that the craft holds up to both editorial and curatorial scrutiny.
• His TEDGlobal 2010 talk, “The beauty of data visualization”, remains one of the most-watched introductions to the field and shapes how senior audiences think about visual storytelling.

Biography highlights

• Author of Information is Beautiful (2009), Knowledge is Beautiful (2014), and Beautiful News (2023), published by HarperCollins.
• Founder of the Information is Beautiful blog and co-founder of the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards (2012).
• TEDGlobal 2010 speaker: “The beauty of data visualization”.
• Information design featured in The Guardian, Wired, and Die Zeit.
• Work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Britain, and the Wellcome Trust gallery (London).
• Began his career as a journalist writing for The Guardian and Wired before building Information is Beautiful into a publishing platform.

Biography

The hardest problem in modern communication is not gathering data. It is making the data mean something to a reader who has eight seconds and a phone. That is the territory David McCandless has worked for nearly two decades, first as a journalist at The Guardian and Wired, then as the founder of Information is Beautiful.

The blog became a publishing programme. Information is Beautiful (2009), Knowledge is Beautiful (2014), and Beautiful News (2023) collect more than 1,500 graphics that take subjects ranging from drug deaths to global wealth and turn them into images a non-specialist can read. The craft sits in the choices: what to compare, what to leave out, what visual metaphor lets a number argue with itself.

In 2012 he co-founded what became the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards with Aziz Cami, then Creative Director at Kantar. Through that platform McCandless has spent more than a decade looking at the best data visualisation work in the world, which gives him an unusually wide reference set when advising teams on what separates a chart that lands from one that does not.

His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, and the Wellcome Trust gallery, and his TEDGlobal 2010 talk on the beauty of data visualisation introduced the field to a mainstream audience. For organisations sitting on data they cannot translate into action, he offers the rarer skill: editorial judgement on what is worth showing, and how.

Key speaking topics

• Data visualisation
• Information design
• Data storytelling
• Data journalism
• Visual communication
• Creativity and pattern recognition
• Infographics in business communication

Ideal for

• CMOs, brand and marketing leaders rethinking how data shapes customer narratives
• Communications, internal comms, and corporate affairs leads briefing senior audiences
• Heads of data, analytics, and insight whose dashboards are not changing decisions
• Innovation and design leaders building visual literacy across the organisation

Audience outcomes

• A working vocabulary for what makes a data visualisation land with a non-specialist audience
• Sharper editorial judgement on which numbers in a dataset are worth showing and which are noise
• Concrete examples from across journalism, design, and the IIB Awards archive of what good looks like
• A clearer view of how to brief designers, agencies, and internal teams on data-led communication