This is a special guest post by Tiago Veloso from Visual Loop – a non-stop stream of Infographics, Maps, Charts and many other Visualization Goodies, with lots of new posts everyday. User submissions are always welcome, opened to artists and designers from all over the world. Be sure to check out Tiago’s first massive hit on Inspired Mag – Info-Visualization Through the Eyes and Talent of 10 Brazilian Designers

Among the large number of data-visualization designs that seem to grow everyday, the Interactive Infographics are my favorites, specially because of the incredible amount of information they can represent.

So, I decided to select 30 of those amazing resources, some of them quite well-known, some maybe not. They help us understand Mankind, reflect on our lifestyle, an even see into the future!

In this selection, I tried to focus on general issues, in a Global perspective – there are hundreds of excellent resources for more local realities, specially inside the websites of the main news agencies.

Environment

Even before the Deepwater Horizon incident, environmental issues such as climate change, global warming or biodiveristy always had a reasonable number of visualization resources available.

Breathing Earth

Evolution of renewable energy

70 Years of Environmental Change

Road Map to Harmony

Climate Time Machine

Society

Here, I’m referring to aspects like economy, demographics and other similar indicators. Here are some of the best tools for that global overview:

CIA World Factbook

The Earth Clock

Earth Pulse

FinViz Financial Visualization Map

International Number Ones

Science and Technology

Of course, this is also a topic filed with visual resources. I included here some graphics about health, space exploration and science, but this is a vast subject that could easily be turned into to an exclusive post (I must recommend here NASA’s Interactive section, from which I grabbed some of the following examples, and it’s a great source to go deeper on this subject).

amFar Global Reach

NASA Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer

The Scale of The Universe

Planet Quest Historic Timeline

NASA Earthquake Study

Computers and Internet

When it comes to infographics, few topics have such a prolific number of appearances like the ones concerning computers and Internet uses around the World. Definitively, another topic that could stand alone as an independent post.

Supercomputing superpowers

W3school’s Historical Browser Statistics

Social Web Involvement

Mobile Intent Index

SuperPower: Visualising the internet

Future

Looking into the Present is important, but not as fun as imagining the outstanding possibilities – and challenges – that we have ahead. There are a couple of interactive resources that help us with that exercise – and dare us to go beyond them.

12 Events that will change everything

Web of Fate

Our Aging World

Honorable mentions

This set of tools takes us far beyond the one-way display of information. Some give the possibility of creating and publishing visualizations, others are just plain fun to play with!

Show Mapping Worlds

Human Development Indices World Map

Gapminder

Charts Bin

Globalis

Many Eyes

Tableau

As usual, feel free to share other interesting tools – we’re always looking for more!!