text: In 1972 and 1973, respectively, the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft included on their vessels the Pioneer Plaques, a pair of gold-anodized aluminum plaques, each featuring a pictorial message. The pictorial messages included nude male and female figures as well as symbols that were intended to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. The images were designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and were unique in that their graphical meanings were to be understandable to extraterrestrial beings, who would have no conception of human language.
  A pioneer in data visualization, Edward Tufte, wrote a series of books – Visual Explanations, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Envisioning Information – on the subject of information graphics. Referred to by The New York Times as the "da Vinci of Data", Tufte began to give day-long lectures and workshops on the subject of infographics starting in 1993. , Tufte still gives these lectures.  To Tufte, good data visualizations represent every data point accurately and enable a viewer to see trends and patterns in the data. Tufte's contribution to the field of data visualization and infographics is considered immense, and his design principles can be seen in many websites, magazines, and newspapers today.