History of infographics in La Vanguardia: we don't need computers

La Vanguardia, a spanish newspaper from Barcelona, published this january an article by Mercè Balada about the history of infographics at this catalonian newspaper. It starts with a definition of infographics, very important to understand what come next:

"Against what we use to think, 'info' on 'infographic' doesn't come from 'informatics', comes from 'information'. Infographics are, by definition, images created with informative purposes, including graphics and text."

This confussion in very common in spanish. But if infographics would be just those works made with computers, works as the 100 years old brazilian graphic published in this blog the other day or the examples shown in the article couldn't be infographics. And they are.Some as good as this one, made by an english scientist that calculated what a man could drink, eat or smoke in 70 years and published on La Vanguardia in 1899:

This idea could be signed by Jaume Serra, today head of infographics at this same newspaper and who have never needed much computers to create great graphics. Tools are just tools.