Although a good old list of things is an important tool for conveying information to an audience (whether that is a reader of an article or your boss during a meeting), it’s hard to imagine a list that is actually exciting to read. Thankfully, illustrators and graphic designers have come to our rescue, creating new visual strategies that can be used to tell a story in an engaging and fun way, one of them being the organisation of content by ‘visual family’. Providing a humorous element, the creation of such a tidy, almost obsessive accumulation of related things and placing them into a neat group is what makes this kind of infographic so attractive and much easier to read than a conventional chart or fact sheet. A new book by Gestalten titledVisual Families takes a deep plunge into the world of this now popular visual language, showcasing compelling examples by various artists whilst exploring how visual-family charts have been used by newspapers, magazines, books, and even company reports to tell a story or convey a message. Adding a bit of excitement and colour to stories that would otherwise be dull and boring, the works contained in Visual Families ask the viewer to take a closer look, make comparisons and perhaps discover a message hidden underneath their colourful surface.