Uncharted Territory by Chris Dalla Riva
INFORMATION DESIGN SYSTEM FOR A PUBLISHED BOOK ON MUSIC AND DATA
CLIENT:
Chris Dalla Riva
Bloomsbury Publishing
ROLE:
Information design, chart system, print production
SCOPE:
45 charts and illustrations
YEAR:
2025
Uncharted Territory is a data-driven history of popular music, written for a general audience rather than a technical one. Its readers arrive from both directions, some for the Beatles, some for the numbers, and the charts had to work for all of them at once.
Dalla Riva sent me the first chapters with basic charts built in Excel: clean, clinical, and easy to skip. Every chart in the book is doing real work for the argument, so when one gets passed over, the point lands softer. The brief was to make them as fun as the book around them, to catch a reader's attention first, then give them a reason to look deeper. Not a chart you skim. One you stop on.
One thing was non-negotiable: nothing could be made more fun at the data's expense. Accuracy came first, every time.
FEATURED IN:
THE APPROACH
Build the formula around the book's structure.
The author sorts the history into thematic "eras" and tackles one era per chapter. But the trends and the analysis run well past any single era's window, so each chart had to do two things at once: show the whole arc, and tell the reader where in that arc the chapter sits.
Where the era mattered to the trend, a shaded bar marks it against the full timeline. I also proposed calling out relevant artists and songs alongside the charts, so a reader who never looks at an axis still has a familiar marker to orient themselves. The result is a visual language the reader learns once, in chapter one, and never has to relearn.
Illustrations add
to the analysis
This chart tracks how long a number one single held the top spot, a figure that swung hard in this era.
Rather than explain the swing in a caption, I drew it. Hey Jude's extraordinary run visibly pushes the average up; the run of week-long number ones that followed drags it back down. The illustration isn't decoration beside the data, it's the mechanism the chapter is describing, so the reader gets the argument from the picture before reading a word of it.
Meeting the technical
parameters
Bloomsbury set the frame: fixed trim sizes, legibility minimums, black-and-white interiors throughout. One ink meant no chart could lean on color to separate anything, so line weight, dash pattern, fill texture and direct labeling carry every distinction color normally would.
Type had to feel modern and warm enough to match the book's voice while staying clean at the smallest reproduction size. I built all charts and illustrations to their print specs and cleared final proofs with the publisher.
GALLERY
THE OUTCOME
45 charts and illustrations, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. The publisher's description leads with the book's "unexpected statistics and playful visualizations."
Featured by Rolling Stone and CNN; reviewed in The Economist, Booklist, The Royal Statistical Society, and Publishers Weekly.