Mona Chalabi is the queen of charts and graphs! She takes information that you probably will get drowned in, be bored to death about and turns them into visual mindscapes. And she knows how to spoof them in ways that are both jarring (so you’ll get how important the information is) and humorous at the same time. She is what we like to call the dope packager of information.
Mona Chalabi describes herself as ‘a journalist who really loves numbers and translates spreadsheets into written pieces, illustrations, audio, and film’
What we especially love about her work is the way she balances brilliant titles, visual cues, and crazy information in bites that are understandable. Like when she illustrated this overlap of people who have depression and anxiety in subsets.
Or when she used the ‘inability to reach the top’ visual figurative expression to depict rising global sea levels. One thing is sure, Mona Chalabi is a genius and we are super-glad we found her work.
Mona Chalabi’s illustrations, which depict everything from immigrant detention to balding patterns, have been commended by the Royal Statistical Society.
She started writing about statistics after analyzing large data sets at the Bank of England, Transparency International and the International Organization for Migration. She is contributing Data Editor at The Guardian.
