Wired calls Manuel Lima "the man who turns data into art." CNN agrees, "when it comes to making data sexy, you can't be too graphic." And the data-sexy Visual Complexity, his first book of illustrated interconnectedness, proves this point abundantly: more than a diagram of associations, it's an optic biography of networks, from primal tree symbols and their root systems to social networking sites and beyond. Art, it seems, is rarely this grounded in reality. And rarely is reality represented with this much detailed beauty. Esteemed author Manuel Lima's visually expressive book is the guiding hand necessary for explaining the awesomely complex associations that define our lives.

Manuel Lima is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, nominated by Creativity magazine as "one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009," and is a senior user experience designer at Microsoft Bing.