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InspirationGraphic Design

Praline's gorgeous graphic design explores tricky concepts of scale

Ok, it's not fair to have favourites, but we've long had a soft spot for London-based agency Praline, and its latest project The Scale of Things has done little to dissuade our love.

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Turquoise book cover for The Scale of Things by Mike Fairbrass and David Tangey, with white geometric lines and text exploring mind-blowing proportions and extraordinary facts

The book was written by Mike Fairbrass and Praline founder and creative director David Tanguy and explores the concept of scale through smart, bold design and a hell of a lot of bonkers facts. The aim, according to the studio, is to render "the unimaginable imaginable." Through clever, witty, and crystal clear illustrations, we can suddenly get our head around the fact that the Sun is 93,000,000 miles from Earth. How? "If we use scale, the Sun becomes a grapefruit, the Earth a grain of sand and the distance between the two a London bus – suddenly, it fits in your head," Praline explains.

Alongside illustrations and neat, sweet sans serif type that boldly sprawls across the pages, the book also uses information graphics to drive the concept forward. The book's a joyful, beautiful thing, and one with serious messages about economics, politics, geography, technology, power and consumption underneath it all.

And where else would you truly be able to comprehend such an array of sizes as "the deepest ocean trench to a T. Rex’s shoe size"?

Bright turquoise book cover with white text stating "As data itself does have slight mass, the entire internet weighs about the same as an egg
Spread from The Scale of Things showing a pink contents page with outlined white text listing topic categories including Biology, Cosmos, Economics, Power, Environment, Technology, Humans and Animals
Open book with turquoise cover featuring white botanical line drawings and the word "BIOLOGY" in a rectangular frame, from Praline's The Scale of Things
Open book with turquoise cover showing a bright blue cup of coffee on the left page and text about human volume on the right page against a pink background
Open book spread showing the word COSMOS in white text on a blue background with geometric line illustrations of planets and orbits
Spread from The Scale of Things book showing moon rocks with dollar signs on a bright yellow background, with text explaining the relative cost of Apollo mission moon rock versus unmanned spacecraft retrieval
Opened book with turquoise spine showing a red spread with the word "POWER" in white inside a rectangle, surrounded by zigzag line illustrations
Open book with turquoise cover showing orange spread with white geometric lines and the word ENVIRONMENT in a rectangular box, from The Scale of Things by Praline
An open book with turquoise pages showing a white aeroplane alongside a white cloud silhouette, with text comparing a Cumulonimbus cloud's weight to a Boeing 747
Open spread from The Scale of Things showing interconnecting grey roads and paths on a peach background with text fragments visible along the winding routes
An open book spread with a bright yellow page displaying the word "ECONOMICS" in white text, surrounded by line-drawn graph patterns suggesting rising and falling trends
Open book spread from The Scale of Things with bright pink and turquoise design showing dollar bills to illustrate Bill Gates's wealth on a comprehensible scale
Open book spread with turquoise spine showing a coral pink page with geometric white line illustrations and the word "HUMANS" in white sans serif type in a hexagonal frame
Open book spread from The Scale of Things showing text "In Your Lifetime" with a turquoise silhouette of a person and six elephants, stating you will eat the equivalent weight of six elephants
Open book spread from The Scale of Things showing an illustration of a shark with text about how sharks would have to eat all larger fish to equal the hummingbirds' rate of hummingbirds
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