Category Archives: books

The Cutaway Illustrations of Fred Freeman

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During the two-year research for our book LOOK INSIDE we discovered many amazing illustrations and artists that, for one reason or another, did not make it into the final version of the book. It would be a pity to leave these forgotten on a drawer, so during the next few weeks we will present here some of these masters of the cutaway.

A while ago we wrote here about Frank Soltesz, an American illustrator active from the 30’s to the 60’s, and author of a marvelous series of architectural cutaways appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Today we want to pay homage to another artist of the same epoch: Fred Freeman.

Fred Freeman started his career in the 30’s. By this time cutaway illustrations were becoming a tool that popular magazine would often use to covey to their readers detailed information about technical topics. Commercial illustrator were often asked to produce cross-sections and cutaways for various publications, sometimes with striking results.

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Fred Freeman was an accomplished American illustrator who designed and illustrated books on naval history, space exploration and other technical subjects. What impressed us most during our research was the wonderful series of cutaway illustrations he created for Collier’s magazine between 1952 and 1954, all of them for the series “Man Will Conquer Space Soon”. The spectacular, full color, spread or full-page illustrations depict in stunning detail cutaways of space stations, spacecraft, space emergency devices, and other aspects of the future of space exploration. The images illustrate the ideas of the then director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, at NASA, Wernher von Braun, a space travel visionary who was already insisting by then on a manned mission to Mars.

It is surprising and disappointing how little information is out there about such a wonderful artist as Fred Freeman. Please let us know if you have any more information about him and we will publish it as an update here.

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The new Atlas of Design

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The latest edition (Volume III) of the Atlas of Design is available for pre-order! The Atlas is an amazing compilation of cartographic design, selected in a worldwide competition by a panel of experts. The range of creative approaches in the 32 maps that make the book presents a wonderful picture of the broad scope of mapmaking styles as well as its challenges. Each map is accompanied by comments from the author, giving us insight about the conception and the ideas behind its creation.

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The book is published every two years by the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) a not-for-profit professional organization for mapmakers. In their words:

The Atlas aims to inspire readers both within the field of cartography and without toward new understandings of design, and of the power that a well-crafted map can have. In an age when more and more mapping tasks are being turned over to computers, the Atlas provides one more answer to the question: What do cartographers do?

I was honored to be asked to write an introductory essay for the book, which I ended noting: “This book is a formidable compilation of beautiful and informative cartography, from classically designed to bold and daring; from hand-drawn gems to multilayered interactive presentations. It is a collection of short stories about the world we live in, each as fascinating and unique as the cartographers who made them”.

When I was Art Director at National Geographic I was lucky to work with some of the best mapmakers in the world (including Ginny Mason, an active force behind the publication of this book), and I was in awe of their skill to achieve beautifully crafted and precise pieces of journalistic storytelling. The work in this compilation speaks to that great skill.

You can preorder the book here. And take a look at some of the work in the previous Volume I and Volume II.

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Form left to right: Co-editors Marty Elmer and Sam Matthews, and assistant editor Ginny Mason

 

Our book LOOK INSIDE in Wired.com

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Screen Shot 2016-10-18 at 10.02.41 AM.png©Nick Kaloterakis / Collected

 

Margaret Rhodes has written a great review of our book LOOK INSIDE at Wired.com, and we can’t be more pleased with it. The article, titled LOOK INSIDE: A SPECTACULAR COLLECTION OF CUTAWAY INFOGRAPHICS, includes a nice gallery of images from the book.

Margaret called us a few days ago and we talked a few minutes about the book:

“From the beginning the idea was to make not only a collection of scientific infographics, but show the whole range of how different artists are using these types of illustrations,” says designer Juan Velasco, who curated the book with his brother, Samuel. (The two also co-founded information design studio 5W Infographics.) Together, the pair began collecting visualizations for the book two years ago, after realizing no such compilation existed.

The result is an exquisite assortment of cross sectional, transparent, and exploded-view cutaways that crisscrosses both history and subject matter. The book traces the earliest evidence of the genre to the Arnhem Land region in northern Australia. There, 28,000 years ago, Aboriginal inhabitants painted diagrams of humans and animals on cave walls, deconstructing their subjects into bones, organs, and muscles. “They are most certainly the first cutaway illustrations ever created,” the Velascos write.

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LOOK INSIDE  is ready to ship in Europe in the Gestalten’s website. It will be available in the U.S. in November 21 and can be preordered already in Amazon.com.

Thanks Margaret!

Our new book: “LOOK INSIDE” coming out this month

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Two years ago, we had the idea of putting together a book about cutaway illustrations, one of our favorite kind of infographics. It would be a showcase of the best, most beautiful and fascinating cutaway illustrations ever created, from historical times to now. It would include not only cutaways, but also cross sections, and exploded views. We pitched the idea to Gestalten, a leading international publisher of graphic books in Germany. We had contributed with a few infographics to some of their books before, and we thought they may be interested. They loved the idea!. We have been working together with Gestalten for the last two years putting together this book. Its title is “LOOK INSIDE: Cutaway Illustrations and Visual Storytelling“, and we are proud to announce it will be released this month in Europe, and in November in the U.S. It is, we believe, the first of its kind, showcasing exclusively cutaways, cross sections and exploded views.

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Lookinside1.pngFender Jaguar, exploded view, by Vladimir Andreev

 

Lookinside2.pngBionic Woman, by Bryan Christie

 

Lookinside3.pngFeline Anatomy, by Raymond Biesinger

All images from Look Inside, Copyright Gestalten 2016

 

Gestalten did a fantastic design job and the book itself looks great. It is a large (9.6 x 13 inches) hardcover volume, 256 pages long, choke-full of gorgeous illustrations, and includes several spectacular gatefolds. As for the contents, the book celebrate cutaways in all their variety and richness, from the renaissance engravings of the mystic-scientist Athanasius Kircher, to today’s 3D, X-Ray-like anatomical views of Bryan Christie. Cutaways, exploded views, and cross sections, are explored across a wide range of applications and disciplines. Architectural renderings, anatomical illustrations, machine diagrams, and even fantasy illustrations are just a few of the various subjects presentes in this compilation.

We are so excited about this! We hope you have as much fun with this book as we had making it. The book will be ready for preorder in a few days in Gestalten’s website.

Randall Munroe’s infographics

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Randall Munroe left his job as a NASA roboticist in 2006, proceed to create xkcd.com, and became famous drawing funny and very smart stick figure web comics. He even won the Hugo award for Best Graphic Story in 2014. Very often his comics reveal his scientific background and frequently take the form of witty infographics. These can use humor to take on very serious subjects. Just a few days ago he posted a very interesting infographic on climate change. It is a huge timeline charting Earth’s average temperature for the last 20,000 years. You can scroll for a good while seeing the temperature slowly rising for millennia, and then rocketing up in the last few years.

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Last year Munroe published a wonderful book of infographics called Thing Explainer. It is not your typical “how it works” book. First, all the graphics are done in Munroe’s charming hand-drawn style. Second, he uses only the 1,000 more frequent words in the English language. This is a brilliant idea: the results are often hilarious, and sometimes curiously revealing. A look at the table of contest gives you the tone of the book: “Tiny bags of water you’re made of” (cells); “Sky boat with turning wings” (helicopter); “Lifting room” (elevator); “Bending computer” (laptop); “The pieces everything is made of” (periodic table). Brilliant!