Book excerpt: We are living in a golden age of data visualization, in which designers are responding to the information overload of our digital era with astonishing feats of visual thinking. Using a wide variety of techniques, they transform complex ideas into clear, engaging, and memorable infographics. In recent years, books and websites have been collecting the field's best. While stimulating, these finished projects offer little insight into how visual solutions were reached, making them of limited use to designers wanting to produce work of their own. In Infographic Designers' Sketchbooks, more than fifty of the world's leading graphic designers and illustrators open up their private sketchbooks to offer a rare glimpse of their creative processes. Emphasizing idea-generating methods—from doodles and drawings to three-dimensional and digital mock-ups—this revelatory collection is the first to go inside designers' studios to reveal the art and craft behind infographic design.