Com­plex net­works are every­where. From the moment we wake we are sur­rounded; from pub­lic trans­port sys­tems to ‘real-life’ (shock hor­ror!) social net­works. They exist, but how can we visu­alise these in an effi­cient and suc­cinct man­ner? That’s the chal­lenge Visu­al­Com­plex­ity has taken on. And won.

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a uni­fied resource space for any­one inter­ested in the visu­al­iza­tion of com­plex net­works. The project’s main goal is to lever­age a crit­i­cal under­stand­ing of dif­fer­ent visu­al­iza­tion meth­ods, across a series of dis­ci­plines, as diverse as Biol­ogy, Social Net­works or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, moti­vate and enlighten any per­son doing research on this field.

Not all projects shown here are gen­uine com­plex net­works, in the sense that they aren’t nec­es­sar­ily at the edge of chaos, or show an irreg­u­lar and sys­tem­atic degree of con­nec­tiv­ity. How­ever, the projects that appar­ently skip this class were cho­sen for two impor­tant rea­sons. They either pro­vide advance­ment in terms of visual depic­tion techniques/methods or show con­cep­tual unique­ness and orig­i­nal­ity in the choice of a sub­ject. Nev­er­the­less, all projects have one trait in com­mon: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

I can’t pick a favourite from all of these great designs, but the ‘Most Vis­ited Projects’ list is a good start (bot­tom left).