Charles Apple | American Copy Editors Society

Every few days or so, someone will forward to me a message or tweet or blog post entitled something like “50 beautiful infographics” or somesuch.

Always on the lookout to post cool graphics samples, I nearly always follow the link. And nearly always, I’m disappointed. I hardly ever see anything new, impressive or even out of the ordinary.

Most of the “infographics” samples floating around out there aren’t even real infograhics. They’re simply icons with numbers and sentences after them. They might tell me a number, but rarely to they show me the number or help me put that number into perspective.

Today, I have a few real infographics to show you. Feel free to pass the link around all you like.

The first one is — hands down — the best timeline I have ever seen. And I have done so many timelines over my career that a few of my friends call me the king of timelines.

But this one – by Garry Blight and Sheila Pulham of the Guardian of London; circulation 283,063 — shows the true future of timelines. Especially interactive ones.

It’s a history of all the protests-turned-revolutions in northern Africa and the Middle East since November. Because it’s interactive, I can do it only so much justice here in the blog. You really need to follow the link and play around with it yourself.

The timeline moves toward and then beneath you. The stripes each represent separate countries. Mouse over the icons you see embedded in the timeline — in this case for Tunisia — to read about events that happened there over the past four months.

Click on the icon and you’ll be taken to an actual online story about the event itself.

The events are color-coded as to what happened. Actual regime changes in each country are represented with a red icon like this.

Here is the entry for Saturday, when things began to heat up in Libya.

This stuff is just amazing. And apparently, my Twitter followers think so, too. I tweeted this a couple of hours ago and my followers — and their followers — have retweeted it 100 times. My original link has received more than 5,000 hits in less than two hours.

Thanks to the awesome Ryk van Niekerk, editor of Sake24, the business sections of Media24 newspapers, for tipping me off about it in the first place.

Again, find the actual interactive graphic here, at the Guardian.

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The other graphics I wish to share with you today are all print pieces from the University of North Carolina.

Seth Wright — a senior in the Reesenews project at UNC and president of the school’s chapter of the Online News Association — posted a batch of links today to some of the more interesting sports graphics I’ve seen lately.

These are all products of the J484 Information Graphics course this semester, Seth says. That class is taught by my old friend Terence Oliver.

And the graphics themselves are not interactive at all. Seth posted good, old-fashioned PDF documents. And every one of them is awesome. Please click any of these for a larger view.

This one provides a great overview of the legacy of UNC basketball. As a loyal Clemson fan, I kind of loathe this. But as a graphic journalist, I have to declare it solidly extraordinary work.

The artist there was Nick Yarbrough. Who presented a lot of information on this page, yet also used a lot of white space and kept it all very clean and organized.

This one shows the history and notable facts of the not-so-old-but-terribly-legendary Dean Dome.

Again, that’s a hell of a lot of info but it’s structured so well that you don’t really suffer from info overload. The artist was Kelly Askew.

Next up: A look at Carolina’s retired jerseys.

The fabulous artist on this fabulous piece: Ann Marie Gaines.

This one looks at the superlative coaching history the Tar Heels have enjoyed over the past half-century.

The artist: Ashile Carlson.

This one focuses on Carolina’s six walk-ons for 2010-11.

The artist: Lennon Dodson.

This super-extraordinary one looks at famous last-shot victories by the Tar Heels.

The artist was Evan Bell.

And this one looks at the recruiting philosophies — and results — of the current Carolina coaching staff.

The artist: Kathryn Faulkner.

The professor of this class — the aforementioned Terence Oliver — tells me:

By the way, the interactives and other good graphics should be posted on the reesenews site soon.

I’ll update with a link here as soon as I see one.

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These folks represent the future of infographics. I mean, damn, they’re college kids. When I was their age, all I cared about was drinking beer and meeting girls. And they’re doing work of this quality. It’s just stunning.

If you happen to work at a newspaper with infographics internships — or full-time infographics jobs — yet to fill and you don’t try to call any of these six talented students, then I’ll have no sympathy for you at all. I’ve put their names and a sample of their work smack in front of you. Do your job and reach out a little, please.

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Find the UNC student graphics — and PDFs of all these pieces — here.

Find the Guardian interactive timeline here.

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UPDATE:

My consulting work here in South Africa sometimes eats into my web scanning time.

Today is one of those days. Just now discovered that the truly awesome Sara Quinn of the Poynter Institute also wrote about the UNC graphics today. Find her column here.