You Have Eric Rodenbeck to Thank for All Those Sweet Infographics

Eric Rodenbeck, the son of German immigrants who settled in Queens, N.Y., was the first in his family to make it to college. Once he got there, though, “I couldn’t figure out what the hell they were talking about,” he says. It was the early 1990s in the architecture program at Cooper Union, and minimalism reigned. Rodenbeck balked. “I was more interested in watching materials flow and building shapes than thinking ahead [to] what it’s going to look like,” he says. He was expelled before he finished his second year—but wound up no worse for the experience.

Rodenbeck is the founder of the graphics company Stamen Design LLC, which he started in 2001 so he could do the thing he’d dreamed about at Cooper Union: use patterns, numbers, and images to communicate big concepts. “I had an appreciation for the pop culture nature of this as a mass-media format to do more than communicate a fact or two,” he says. Data visualization’s roots in technical disciplines such as computer programming have “shackled it,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in breaking free of those boundaries.”