Gods of the visual essay
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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:
- What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty?
- What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?
- What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?
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:
- What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
- Computational Foundations for the Second Law of Thermodynamics
- Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT
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.
One thing I can learn from Maggie is to put essays into different categories. She uses a gardening analogy - “Budding” for works in progress, “Evergreen” for complete essays, “Seedling” for first versions/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.
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.
