James' World 2

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Key Takeaways

• Big Think has launched its first-ever online store, a collaboration with the infographic poster company Pop Chart.
• Our first poster with Pop Chart is “A Visual History of the Universe,” which features stunning illustrations of the universe from its earliest moments to the present.
• Check out Big Think’s store on Pop Chart to find the poster — as well as T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and, soon, our quarterly print magazines. 

Every few months, I round up useless or unused objects in my house, walk to the alley, and plop them into the dumpster without a second thought. I am no collector or hoarder. I only really value a few physical possessions: my three guitars, my books and magazines, and a small collection of posters and art (my favorite being a painting of a stork whose eyes stare right through you, made by my late grandpa).

That last category is something I could use much more of: beautiful things to look at. One piece that’ll soon hang on the wall of my office comes from my colleague, Ben Gibson, a design director at Big Think.

He recently created a poster called “A Visual History of the Universe,” made with help from Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and author of the Big Think column Starts With A Bang. It’s a poster that strikes a rare balance between being aesthetically stunning while also teaching you something useful — in this case, scientists’ best explanation for how everything around you came to be.

Ben’s been striking that balance since he was a kid.

“I had always loved looking at things like maps, charts, and cutaway illustrations, and spent a lot of hours (too many!) trying to draw them myself,” he said.

In 2010, he cofounded the infographics poster company Pop Chart with Patrick Mulligan after the two met while working at Penguin Books.

“Patrick also loved this stuff, and we started finding ways to incorporate these things into the books we were working on at Penguin — but we realized we needed a bigger canvas.”

The first poster the two produced was a chart of rapper names, diagrammed according to semantics. They’ve since sold hundreds of thousands of infographic posters and other products, becoming a design shop for advertising, events, publishing, and custom merchandise, with clients like HBO, Nike, Wieden + Kennedy, The New York Times, and the MoMA Design Store.

Pop Chart’s posters cover everything from literature’s most famous opening lines (as analyzed through the Reed-Kellogg system) to a visual breakdown of the Beatles’ discography by instruments featured on each song to a taxonomical diagram of every species of bird in North America — a bestseller that Ben said took about four months of “pretty painstaking research, illustration, and design to complete.”

The New York Times has dubbed Pop Chart “the poster mavens.” Fast Company described their posters as “catnip for uber-geeks.” Popular Science called them the “master of the infographic poster.”

Now, Big Think is calling them a partner. On Pop Chart, we recently launched Big Think’s first-ever store, where you can find our “A Visual History of the Universe” poster, along with Big Think T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and much more.

We’ll be designing and releasing many more posters over the coming months. It’s a natural partnership: Like Big Think, Pop Chart is always “uncovering deeper, surprising, and fascinating layers” about the world, Ben said. Big Think does that with articles and videos. Pop Chart turns those ideas into something worth hanging on your wall.

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Ideas worth displaying.

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