"Beautiful Numbers" series of 8 beer tumblers designed Stefan Sagmeister depicting data visualizations of environmental developments from the past years that are either neutral or positive. The collection comprises eight botanical illustrations by Raxenne Maniquiz, namely "Stuff Used", "Greenhouse Gases", "Kyoto Protocol", "Clean Water", "UN Climate Convention", "Marine Protected Areas", "Biodiversity Sites", "Green Climate Fund", hand-painted on muslin glass by artisans at Lobmeyr.
"Beautiful Numbers", Sagmeister’s body of work created throughout 2020, considers how, despite media’s depictions of doom and pessimism, many facets of human life have improved over the past century. Sagmeister looks at data – from the number of females in Parliament to literacy levels, to suicide rates – and visualizes them by transforming 19th Century genre paintings, embroidered canvases, lenticular prints, and hand-painted water glasses with innovative graph forms to represent the progress made in recent history. For Sagmeister "Beautiful Numbers" is emblematic of how the long-term approach he cultivates in his design practice alters perceptions from the here and now to a longer arc of history.
