Info We Trust is an ambitious, visually stunning book that sits somewhere between philosophy, information design, and a collection of visual essays. It is clearly the product of many years of thinking, reading, and making. That depth and experience is both its greatest strength and, at times, its main challenge.

From a purely visual standpoint, the book is exceptional. Andrews is remarkably disciplined in his use of a limited color palette, and the combination of three colors with hand-drawn illustrations gives the book a distinctive and coherent visual identity. The drawings are both intentional and decorative, they are a pleasure to look at, page after page.

Content-wise, the book is dense with references. The marginal notes, quotations, and extensive bibliography leave no doubt about Andrews’ breadth of knowledge. Again and again, I found myself wanting to read the original sources and to follow the many intellectual threads Andrews lays out. In that sense, the book functions very well as a gateway to a much wider intellectual exploration.

At the same time, this abundance can be overwhelming. Especially in the earlier chapters, the book leans heavily into philosophical reflection. Ideas, metaphors, and quotations accumulate, but a clear argumentative trajectory is often hard to discern. Reading these chapters requires patience: each sentence needs to be savoured rather than devoured. For readers like me, who prefer an analytical, structured approach, this can make progress feel slow, even if the reading itself is never unpleasant. I must admit that I skipped most of the quotes and notes in the margins…

For me, the book truly comes into focus in the final chapters (roughly chapters 13–15). Here, Andrews becomes much more concrete, offering insight into his actual working process: how he frames problems, explores structure, reasons visually, and approaches projects as an information designer. These chapters are highly relatable and, I suspect, will resonate strongly with practitioners. They clarify retroactively what the earlier philosophical groundwork was aiming toward.

In the end, Info We Trust is not a manual or a step-by-step guide, and readers looking for quick, actionable takeaways may struggle with parts of it. But as a reflective, carefully crafted work about how we think with information, and how we might do so more responsibly, it is thoughtful, inspiring, and visually remarkable. Best approached slowly, selectively, and perhaps revisited over time rather than read straight through in one go.

Read this review, as well as many others, in our complete overview of data visualization books (work in progress).