KBM Charts is an independent visual knowledge project founded by Kim Ban Myông.
We create charts, maps, timelines, posters, and visual references that transform complex historical and textual materials into clear, carefully designed visual systems.
The project sits between information design, editorial design, historical research, and visual storytelling.
Why Visual Systems?
Most people do not learn history from original sources. They encounter it through books, online encyclopaedias, videos, summaries, and popular narratives.
The problem is not simply that historical sources are difficult. The deeper problem is that public-facing historical knowledge is often presented without its structure.
A reader may learn a few famous stories, names, dynasties, battles, or religious traditions, but still struggle to understand how they belong together. Where did this narrative come from? Which sources support it? What is its chronology? Which parts are certain, reconstructed, disputed, or simplified?
This problem also affects creators. Without a clear understanding of structure, historical content can easily become a chain of attractive fragments: persuasive enough to circulate, but too fragile to support real understanding.
KBM Charts responds to this problem through visual systems. Charts, timelines, maps, and diagrams can reveal relationships, sequences, sources, gaps, variants, and interpretive layers that scattered prose often leaves invisible.
The aim is not to reduce history to neat graphics. It is to make the architecture of historical knowledge visible.
What We Make
Visual knowledge has a long history.
Across cultures and traditions, people have used manuscript illustrations, genealogical tables, religious diagrams, maps, timelines, cosmological schemes, and symbolic charts to understand complex knowledge. KBM Charts continues this tradition through contemporary information design, editorial design, and visual storytelling.
Our core works are printed and digital visual references: genealogical charts, timelines, maps, relationship diagrams, textual structures, historical comparisons, and other visual systems. They are designed to help readers see how people, events, places, sources, and traditions relate to one another.
These works may take the form of printed posters, digital downloads, online visual essays, and publication-based projects. They are made for study, teaching, display, and collection.
KBM Charts also develops art-led products from its visual materials. Illustrations, symbols, typographic details, historical motifs, and fragments from the charts may be extended into notebooks, stationery, textiles, prints, and other designed objects.
The aim is to create works that are both useful and beautiful: clear enough to support learning, and visually rich enough to live with.
Themes & Materials
History and cultural knowledge are too vast to be treated as a single undifferentiated field.
KBM Charts is therefore organised into Themes. Each Theme focuses on a particular body of material, making the work easier to research, design, present, and understand.
For audiences and buyers, Themes provide a clearer way to explore the project: individual charts, posters, articles, and products can be understood as parts of a larger visual collection.
The first public Theme is Biblical Theme, centred on the Christian Bible and its related traditions. It includes visual references and cultural products exploring biblical genealogies, canons, scripts, figures, and symbolic materials.
Future Themes will expand into other historical, textual, religious, and cultural fields.
Method
Historical knowledge rarely reaches the public in a direct line from source to reader. It usually passes through selection, translation, summary, interpretation, and retelling.
During this process, sources are often pushed into the background. This may happen because of limited space, platform formats, narrative efficiency, accessibility, or the author’s own interpretive choices. As knowledge is repeated and simplified, it can become easier to circulate, but harder to trace.
KBM Charts treats this as a design problem.
We aim to connect readers more directly with the materials behind historical claims. Wherever possible, our charts and articles make sources visible through references, notes, visual comparison, textual fragments, manuscript information, scholarly context, and links to related materials.
Instead of relying on vague claims such as “historical sources say…”, we try to show how information is formed: which sources it comes from, how traditions differ, where uncertainty remains, and where interpretation enters the picture.
We cannot always realise this principle perfectly. Historical materials are complex, scattered, disputed, and often difficult to access. Visual design also requires selection, hierarchy, and compression.
But our standard is clear: knowledge should be traceable. Our method is not only to make knowledge visible, but to make its sources visible as well.
Founder
KBM Charts is founded and designed by Kim Ban Myông, a visual communication designer based in London.
Kim studied MA Data Visualisation at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. His work brings together information design, editorial design, illustration, and an ongoing interest in history, texts, and visual storytelling.
Follow / Contact / Support
Follow KBM Charts for new historical charts, visual references, product updates, short research notes, and behind-the-scenes design process.
For enquiries, collaborations, commissions, or general contact, please get in touch by email.
You can also support the project by purchasing printed editions, downloading digital resources, sharing the work, or supporting KBM Charts on Buy Me a Coffee.
