CNN wins Kantar-backed data visualisation contest

The global awards were created to champion data visualisation and information design and were jointly organised by Kantar and data-visualisation studio Information Is Beautiful, founded by former Guardian journalist David McCandless. The awards recieved 1,102 entries and handed out gold, silver and bronze awards in 15 categories.

CNN took both the best data journalism prize and the overall prize of the night for its war casualties graphic “Home and Away” by Stamen (below). It shows the 3,167 US and coalition based caualties to date in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also shows how many hometowns in the US have been struck by those losses.

The winners were selected by a panel of judges including musician and visual artist Brian Eno, senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art Paola Antonelli, Maria Popova, the editor of cultural curation website BrainPickings.org and Simon Rogers, editor of Guardian Datablog.

McCandless said: “Data visualisation is a rising trend across many domains – web, science, media, politics – and it’s a really artful, really tricky fusion of analysis, design and story-telling.”

Aziz Cami, creative director of Kantar, added: “The awards have really demonstrated the power of data visualisation as both a creative and commercial tool.”

The full list of winners can be found at http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com.