The first storyboards for Close Encounters of the Third Kind were drawn by Steven Spielberg, who used stick figures. Artist Edward Carlson penciled his vision for Seattle’s Space Needle on a napkin in a coffee house. The inventors of Super Mario Brothers designed their video game, square by square, on graph paper.

Complex ideas begin as simple drawings. And data-visualization—the use of visual tools to analyze and present information— is no exception. Readers often imagine the creators of infographics as master programmers and number crunchers. But, many times, their primary design tools are pen and paper.

This creative process is laid bare in the Infographic Designers’ Sketchbooks, a fascinating collection of preliminary drawings, unfinished mock-ups and intermediate prototypes that