Last Words | Charts and Graphs

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché (“Since the dawn of time”), not with a banality (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of …”), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.

Fallen.io masterfully visualizes the harrowing death toll of World War II, using animation and multiple presentation techniques outlined in this chapter. Deaths stack up in unit charts in which each unit represents 1,000 deaths before those units are redistributed into a stacked area chart that shows how the deaths occurred over time.

“The Gift of the Dying,”

The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story,