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Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge
In this follow-up to his hugely popular The Book of Trees and Visual Complexity, Manuel Lima takes us on a lively tour through millennia of circular information design. Three hundred detailed and colorful illustrations from around the world cover an encyclopedic array of subjects—architecture, urban planning, fine art, design, fashion, technology, religion, cartography, biology, astronomy, and physics, all based on the circle, the universal symbol of unity, wholeness, infinity, enlightenment, and perfection. Clay tokens used by ancient Sumerians as a system of recording trade are juxtaposed with logos of modern retailers like Target; Venn diagrams are discussed alongside the trefoil biohazard symbol, symbols of the Christian trinity, and the Olympic rings; and a diagram revealing the characteristics of ten thousand porn stars displays structural similarities to early celestial charts placing the earth at the center of the universe.
Lima's introduction provides an authoritative history of the circle, and a preface describes his unique taxonomy of the many varieties of circle diagrams, rounding out this visual feast for infographics enthusiasts.
Lima's introduction provides an authoritative history of the circle, and a preface describes his unique taxonomy of the many varieties of circle diagrams, rounding out this visual feast for infographics enthusiasts.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published May 2, 2017
148 people are currently reading
686 people want to read
About the author
Manuel Lima
14 books64 followersA Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009,” Manuel Lima is the founder of VisualComplexity.com, Design Lead at Google, and a regular teacher of data visualization at Parsons School of Design.
Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and has spoken at numerous conferences, universities, and festivals around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Eyeo, Ars Electronica, IxDA Interaction, Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and MediaLab-Prado Madrid. He has also been featured in various magazines and newspapers, such as Wired, the New York Times, Science, Nature, Businessweek, Creative Review, Fast Company, Forbes, Grafik, SEED, étapes, and El País.
His first book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, has been translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese. His second, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, covers eight hundred years of human culture through the lens of the tree figure, from its entrenched roots in religious medieval exegesis to its contemporary, secular digital themes.
With more than twelve years of experience designing digital products, Manuel has worked for Codecademy, Microsoft, Nokia, R/GA, and Kontrapunkt. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design. During the course of his MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image, and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Manuel is a leading voice on information visualization and has spoken at numerous conferences, universities, and festivals around the world, including TED, Lift, OFFF, Eyeo, Ars Electronica, IxDA Interaction, Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Royal College of Art, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, ENSAD Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and MediaLab-Prado Madrid. He has also been featured in various magazines and newspapers, such as Wired, the New York Times, Science, Nature, Businessweek, Creative Review, Fast Company, Forbes, Grafik, SEED, étapes, and El País.
His first book, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, has been translated into French, Chinese, and Japanese. His second, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge, covers eight hundred years of human culture through the lens of the tree figure, from its entrenched roots in religious medieval exegesis to its contemporary, secular digital themes.
With more than twelve years of experience designing digital products, Manuel has worked for Codecademy, Microsoft, Nokia, R/GA, and Kontrapunkt. He holds a BFA in Industrial Design and a MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design. During the course of his MFA program, Manuel worked for Siemens Corporate Research Center, the American Museum of Moving Image, and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping in research projects for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 31, 2023
The Book of Circles [2017] – ★★★★
This illustrated non-fiction is all about the human presentation of knowledge through circles. The author states how natural it is for humans to try to classify and systematise all sorts of knowledge, and the circle serves as a perfect vehicle for doing so because it is a perfect geometrical figure standing for the Sun, among other things, and representing a multitude of other concepts, including movement, unity, wholeness, perfection and infinity. Being a shape that is omnipresent in nature, the circle may also be attracting our attention because of our innate evolutionary tendency to seek out human faces/eyes.
A large chunk of this book is devoted to showing various circles being used to illustrate and explain all sorts of concepts and progressions, from the presentations of the solar system, scientific theorems and alchemical tables to city maps, world economics and online engagements. There are things in this book which I never thought have been or could have been analysed using a circle, including the “Lineage of Sin in the Bible” (2009) by Anna Filipova and the changing colour of Lego sets (2015) by David Eaton.
Naturally, what caught my eye are the literary circular representations, for example, a team at DensityDesign produced a circular graph showing the breakdown of five Dickens’s most famous works “to highlight the linguistic relationships among them”, with the size of the bubbles in the graph corresponding to the number of times the word is used in all the works. David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations were analysed, and such words as “time”, “house”, “Sir”, “mother”, “father”, “man”, “good”, “day” and “night” are all noted as repeated and inter-linked. Another unusual graph showed how often the word “war” has appeared in Popular Science magazine over the course of 130 years, and yet another circular presentation that I found particularly interesting was the graph titled “Dead Reckoning” by Alberto Lucas Lopez. It showed the leading causes of death around the world, with each cause and disease, as well as low and high-income countries’ comparisons, mapped out.
⚪ This beautiful book does lack a deeper insight into the nature of circles and what can we conclude about the circular presentations of knowledge included. However, the book certainly makes up for this oversight by the sheer number of illustrative examples on display. It is recommended in particular for those who love discovering quirky world, science or history facts.
This illustrated non-fiction is all about the human presentation of knowledge through circles. The author states how natural it is for humans to try to classify and systematise all sorts of knowledge, and the circle serves as a perfect vehicle for doing so because it is a perfect geometrical figure standing for the Sun, among other things, and representing a multitude of other concepts, including movement, unity, wholeness, perfection and infinity. Being a shape that is omnipresent in nature, the circle may also be attracting our attention because of our innate evolutionary tendency to seek out human faces/eyes.
A large chunk of this book is devoted to showing various circles being used to illustrate and explain all sorts of concepts and progressions, from the presentations of the solar system, scientific theorems and alchemical tables to city maps, world economics and online engagements. There are things in this book which I never thought have been or could have been analysed using a circle, including the “Lineage of Sin in the Bible” (2009) by Anna Filipova and the changing colour of Lego sets (2015) by David Eaton.
Naturally, what caught my eye are the literary circular representations, for example, a team at DensityDesign produced a circular graph showing the breakdown of five Dickens’s most famous works “to highlight the linguistic relationships among them”, with the size of the bubbles in the graph corresponding to the number of times the word is used in all the works. David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations were analysed, and such words as “time”, “house”, “Sir”, “mother”, “father”, “man”, “good”, “day” and “night” are all noted as repeated and inter-linked. Another unusual graph showed how often the word “war” has appeared in Popular Science magazine over the course of 130 years, and yet another circular presentation that I found particularly interesting was the graph titled “Dead Reckoning” by Alberto Lucas Lopez. It showed the leading causes of death around the world, with each cause and disease, as well as low and high-income countries’ comparisons, mapped out.
⚪ This beautiful book does lack a deeper insight into the nature of circles and what can we conclude about the circular presentations of knowledge included. However, the book certainly makes up for this oversight by the sheer number of illustrative examples on display. It is recommended in particular for those who love discovering quirky world, science or history facts.
February 29, 2020
If you think it, you can put it in a circle! This collection of circularly presented information spans time and virtually all scholarly pursuits. I particularly appreciated exposure to the older examples of circular illustrations, such as the early maps of the Earth and the solar system. A favorite item included in the book was the Victorian board game based on Nellie Bly’s trip around the world. The one drawback to this collection is that intricate or large artworks could only be appreciated on a macro scale, as the design of the book did not seem to allow for inset detail or individual works spread over two pages. This made it a little difficult to appreciate some of the contemporary renderings of circles, which utilize large datasets and aim to present them in a visual format. As a collection, however, this was an amusing and informative exploration of the ubiquity and utility of circles.
May 31, 2017
Lima talks in the introduction about the different interior structures for circles, and gives historical context. But the stars of the book are the illustrations, round shapes from the cosmos to the cell, maps of inner, earthly, and outer space. A visual delight.
July 9, 2018
TODO full review:
+ Similar in scope and approach to Manuel Lima's The Book of Trees: The Flowingdata Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics.
+++ An ultimate guide on circular information visualization. Includes an excellent history and survey of the state-of-the-art techniques for the visualization of information in a circular form.
- Unlike The Book of Trees: The Flowingdata Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics, there is insufficient information about the important software packages and scientific software that can create circular information visualization. Circos is mentioned; could it be Circo from the graphviz package?!
+ Types of circular graphs, one per chapter: (1) rings and spirals, (2) wheels and pies, (3) grids and graticules, (4) ebbs and flows inside a circular space, (5) shapes filling circular boundaries, (6) maps and blueprints, (7) nodes and links. Seems like the taxonomy of circular visualizations includes fewer classes than the taxonomy of tree-like visualizations proposed by the same author.
+++/- Excellent coverage of historical material. Unlike The Book of Trees: The Flowingdata Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics , there is no summary of the historical figures involved in the development of the earliest form of each graph.
++ Good coverage of the historical, recent, and present-day projects.
--- After reading this book, I am still unsure if circular visualizations are interesting but for very specific and idiosyncratic fields of science and the most specialized of depictions. This is a pity, and in contrast to what I concluded from the author's book on tree-like visualizations.
+ Similar in scope and approach to Manuel Lima's The Book of Trees: The Flowingdata Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics.
+++ An ultimate guide on circular information visualization. Includes an excellent history and survey of the state-of-the-art techniques for the visualization of information in a circular form.
- Unlike The Book of Trees: The Flowingdata Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics, there is insufficient information about the important software packages and scientific software that can create circular information visualization. Circos is mentioned; could it be Circo from the graphviz package?!
+ Types of circular graphs, one per chapter: (1) rings and spirals, (2) wheels and pies, (3) grids and graticules, (4) ebbs and flows inside a circular space, (5) shapes filling circular boundaries, (6) maps and blueprints, (7) nodes and links. Seems like the taxonomy of circular visualizations includes fewer classes than the taxonomy of tree-like visualizations proposed by the same author.
+++/- Excellent coverage of historical material. Unlike The Book of Trees: The Flowingdata Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics , there is no summary of the historical figures involved in the development of the earliest form of each graph.
++ Good coverage of the historical, recent, and present-day projects.
--- After reading this book, I am still unsure if circular visualizations are interesting but for very specific and idiosyncratic fields of science and the most specialized of depictions. This is a pity, and in contrast to what I concluded from the author's book on tree-like visualizations.
November 18, 2021
I was looking forward to reading this book, and I snatched up the Kindle version for a good price, fully realizing the graphics would be hard to decipher compared to the physical book. Dozens and dozens of "circular" representations are covered. Each is described, with short explanations. But what I missed was what we used to call the "so-what" factor. In order to truly appreciate these representations, I wanted the author to explain what conclusions one could draw from each. With no analysis of any of the diagrams, I couldn't tell if a diagram was useful, or whimsical, or enabled the designer to discover something that no one had ever considered before.
October 13, 2024
4,5 stars; excellent book on design with many inspiring examples, be sure to also check out; Building Science Graphics: An Illustrated Guide to Communicating Science through Diagrams and Visualizations, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge and Oliver Byrne's Elements of Euclid: The First Six Books with Coloured Diagrams and Symbols.
August 30, 2021
Fascinating visual map through history
Some historians use a timeline to map history. But as a non-historian author, Lima takes readers (viewers) on a fascinating circular tour through history, or historical data at least. It’s amazing to see the volvelles, the star bursts (the star maps!) and even a circular map of Zeus’s romantic conquests among the variety of circular maps. I may like the author’s book on tree diagrams more, but this volume is fascinating in its own right. Tip: buy a hard copy; the Kindle version is not nearly as gratifying to read, and indeed—is harder to traverse. Still fascinating.
Some historians use a timeline to map history. But as a non-historian author, Lima takes readers (viewers) on a fascinating circular tour through history, or historical data at least. It’s amazing to see the volvelles, the star bursts (the star maps!) and even a circular map of Zeus’s romantic conquests among the variety of circular maps. I may like the author’s book on tree diagrams more, but this volume is fascinating in its own right. Tip: buy a hard copy; the Kindle version is not nearly as gratifying to read, and indeed—is harder to traverse. Still fascinating.
November 2, 2019
An unbelievably rich visual experience—especially once you allow yourself the possibility of not studying each graph and diagram in great detail. I suggest focusing on those that draw your attention; otherwise you'll be at it for a long, long time. You do not have to be an infographic enthusiast to appreciate the sheer beauty of the depicted circles in all their asymmetric symmetry.
July 27, 2017
Loved learning the word volvelles for a favorite chart type and placing a name to Voronoi charts. And most of this book is excellent, in its curation and organization. I missed seeing annulus charts, tho, as they seem a likely form.
May 13, 2023
Graphics illegible because of low resolution scans on Kindle edition
Interesting book but very useful because fine text on numerous graphics is illegible, I suggest keeping to paper copies of this book.
Interesting book but very useful because fine text on numerous graphics is illegible, I suggest keeping to paper copies of this book.
November 27, 2019
An excellent and beautiful book that rounds out a trilogy of similar works from the author. Possibly the most informative "coffee table" book you'll ever find.
August 25, 2020
Great book with beautiful diagrams.
November 16, 2020
Beautiful.
December 25, 2020
Beautiful data
September 7, 2021
It’s quite good.
April 28, 2022
Very much enjoyed this book. A great mix of ancient texts and modern data analysis. Good for history buffs, and computer geeks, which I am both.
January 22, 2023
Provides a comprehensive history and interpretations of circles. As an artist and researcher, found this book very valuable for data visualizations as well as art making.
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March 26, 2024
More of a research/picture book—giving 5 stars for cool pictures and artifacts
August 11, 2025
refreshing
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November 25, 2017This book is filled with cool visualizations and I enjoyed the taxonomy the author presented. Sadly, one of my main takeaways is that circles really don't work well for presenting information if what you really wanted to get across was the data. Very neat to look at, regardless.
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September 7, 2018302.2223 L7327 2017
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews