Megan Jaegerman’s brilliant news graphics

Edward Tufte,

Megan Jaegerman produced some of the best news graphics ever while working at The New York Times from 1990 to 1998. Her work is smart, finely detailed, elegant, witty, inventive, informative. A fierce researcher and reporter, she writes gracefully and precisely. Megan has the soul of a news reporter, who happens to use graphs, tables, and illustrations–as well as words–to explain the news. Her best work is the best work in news graphics.

In 2004-2005, she revised one of her Times news graphics for my book Beautiful Evidence (pages 116-117), shown below. The revision includes several private jokes: images of E. J. Marey (from BE), Kenneth Noland (from Mark Tansey’s The Myth of Depth in Visual Explanations), ET in the sculpture studio, and a friend of Megan’s–somehow the four of us have unfortunately become involved with handguns. This work took months; for example, Megan and I exchanged many emails and 3 redesigns figuring out whether the stoplight should be red, green, or yellow.

Color is used to highlight how the gun moves and how the gun reveals itself, short visual noun-verb sentences that indicate the key signs that help detectives to spot someone carrying a hidden handgun. Thus the color usually has a distinct substantive point and is not just used to depict surfaces or to decorate the news.

Most of all, the content is really interesting; we learn something new from Megan Jaegerman’s fine reporting work. Details of the reporting are discussed in the text immediately below the graphic.

Here is my text from Beautiful Evidence analyzing the graphic:

Below, Megan’s original handgun graphic from The New York Times, May 26, 1992:

Here are more of her greatest hits:

Below, Megan’s classic instructions for basic exercises became widespread refrigerator-door art in New York City (according to an editor at the Times).

The next 2 displays below beautifully combine tables, images, text–whatever it takes to explain the content. Megan Jaegerman’s work has consistently this spirit: content-driven, no segregation of information by its mode of production, whatever it takes to explain something.

In this graphic below on quitting smoking, the data graph at the bottom showing the relapse/time curve is a fine touch, a reminder of the temperature/time graph in Minard’s French Invasion of Russia in 1812.