I have been writing and illustrating picture books for the very young for the last 14 years. But actually i began working on this book 17 years ago. Long before I began work on my first picture book.

The idea came in 2006. UC Berkeley had announced that year they were putting all their undergraduate lectures online for free. They were the first university in the world to do this. I began to listen to some of them, psychology and philosophy and others but one course title stood out as I scrolled through: THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION. 

I contacted the lecturers, Paul Duguid and Geoff Nunberg. They very kindly gave me their reading lists and helped edit the material. Geoff sadly passed away in 2020 and the book is dedicated to him. I think we have managed to make a degree course, the history of media, accessible for 10 year olds. I didn’t cut out any of the key concepts. I think we made a 3rd level media course accessible by making it visual.

The other thing that struck me the most is that this history is connected so closely to the history of graphic design, visual communication and media studies: all the subjects that I had studied. The history of information and the history of visual communication are the same history. So it makes sense to tell the story visually, something I am well-positioned to do. Immediately I knew I wanted to make a book. A history of graphics told through graphics.

The history of information follows history of information technology: IT. Computers, internet and AI. But it is does this by taking a very wide view of information technologies. Drawing is an information technology. Writing is an information technology. All communication is. And in fact there is actually a very clear line of evolution from cave paintings all the way to AI. Drawing evolved into writing, to print and mass media, social media. All are information. And AI simply harvests this and repackages it.

The interesting thing is information technologies are all of course also disinformation technologies. So there is always this undercurrent across all of this. Around 1500 just after print was invented we saw stories about witches, today we see a rise in fake news. When you see how the media has been used and controlled throughout history, you can start to understand more clearly how it is controlled today.