The Tremendous 10 link roundup, #149

Aaaaaannnnnnndddd… we’re back. It’s the return of The Tremendous 10.

1. The simple genius of a good graphic | “In a talk that’s part history lesson, part love letter to graphics, information designer Tommy McCall traces the centuries-long evolution of charts and diagrams—and shows how complex data can be sculpted into beautiful shapes.”
2. Data visualisation, from 1987 to today | “Looking back over 30 years of making charts and maps for The Economist.”
3. Your Friendly Guide to Colors in Data Visualisation | “So how should you choose colors for your project? In data vis, the way you chose your colors depends on your data. There are two options: For continuous data you use color gradients, and for categorical data you use distinctive colors.”
4. The Subtle Sexism of Icons | “As a designer, you have to pick your battles. This is one worth fighting.”
5. A Decision Tree for Designers | “When teammates go rogue, you need a system for reining everyone back in.”
6. Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound. | “When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age.”
7. Index: A Brief History | “The use of indexes dates back to Greco-Roman antiquity, with seeds of their origins found in the separate penned lists or summaries of books and chapter titles. And, although quite a number have survived, they resemble more an ordered table of contents, rather than an alphabetical subject index. To trace the origins of the alphabetical subject index we must first trace the origins of alphabetization.“
8. Here’s A Font That Lets You Cheat On Your Term Papers | “It’s called Times Newer Roman and it looks like a teacher-approved font — just, uh, bigger.”
9. The Gorgeous Typeface That Drove Men Mad and Sparked a 100-Year Mystery | “So, night after night, he was making it his business to “bequeath” it to the river, in his words, screwing his partner out of his half of their work and destroying a legendarily beautiful typeface forever. Or so it seemed.”
10. The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media | “To be alive and online in our time is to feel at once incensed and stultified by the onrush of information, helpless against the rising tide of bad news and worse opinions.”

Image: font sample for Times Newer Roman by MSCHF, link #8.