Drawing ‘nothing’

The Dutch government launched a campaign aimed at a smoke-free generation by 2040. To discourage smoking, a large portion of the cigarette price consists of excise duty: a tax designed to make the habit expensive. I was visualising exactly how much of the price was tax, and how much wasn't. Then I got to e-cigarettes. Hugely popular among young adults, no excise duty whatsoever. From the start I knew I wanted to show that 0%: the absence of tax was the whole point. But I couldn't figure out what zero actually looks like. How do you draw something that isn't there? I kept overcomplicating it. The answer was already in my own visual language: copy the style I used for the rest of the cigarette, drop the opacity, add a dotted outline. An absence that looks like a presence. Sometimes the solution is almost insultingly simple.

The second project took longer to untangle and felt more personal. The Netherlands Institute for Social Research published a report concluding that second-generation immigrants are socially integrated but don't feel at home. It made headlines. Being a second-generation immigrant myself, I read it carefully. The study focused on seven minority groups. No South- or East-Asian minority was included at all: not a small oversight, given the size of that community in the Netherlands. I wanted to show that gap: how many people are actually in this group, and how many were represented in the research?

I spent a long time trying to visualise percentages, proportions and complex breakdowns. It kept getting bigger and more cluttered. Eventually I told my colleague I was stuck. She asked what I was trying to show. I said: none of these people are represented. She said: "exactly."

I stopped looking for a way to show zero and just showed… nothing. An empty space where people should have been illustrated. The absence was the data.

In hindsight both solutions are obvious. But there's something about a deadline and a blank canvas that makes nothing feel impossible to draw. But a(n almost) blank canvas was exactly what I was looking for.

Visualising ‘the deadliest’