Chart Designer Nigel Holmes first surveyed the distinctive shapes of America through the window of a Greyhound bus. Having completed his M.A. in illustration at London's Royal College of Art in 1966, British-born Holmes was embarked on a 99-days-for-$99 visual tour of the U.S., during which he filled his sketch pads and memory with images of cars, drive-in movie theaters, billboard displays and fast-food emporiums. "I was tremendously influenced by what I saw and by new techniques used in American graphics," he says. "I decided, however, that I could never work here." It took a decade and the entreaties of Art Director Walter Bernard to change his mind, but in 1978, after completing several freelance assignments for TIME, Holmes moved his family across the Atlantic and became the magazine's full-time chart specialist.

Holmes begins a project by looking at the numbers. In this week's issue, a TIME-commissioned Yankelovich poll provided him with the raw data for charts that were to accompany a Nation story on U.S. foreign policy and the presidential race. Reporter-Researchers Noel McCoy and Deborah Wells compiled figures for charts illustrating this week's World assessment of how various nations align with the Soviet Union, and two Business stories.

The challenge, says Holmes, is "to present statistics as a visual idea rather than a tedious parade of numbers. Without being frivolous, I want to entertain the reader as well as inform him." In some cases, the very curves of plotted statistics suggest an image. Thus the lines on this week's Business graph tracing OPEC's contribution to inflation became the band of an Arab headdress. "I have to be careful to choose the right symbols," he says.

"A straw hat with a striped band may mean campaigning in the U.S., but in England it's boating on a river." Ideas may come from unlikely sources. One of his son's comic books inspired the drawings for a Science story on black holes in September 1978. "Tool catalogues are particularly helpful," Holmes says. "An ax can be used for chopping a budget or firing Cabinet members." A glistening picture of Body Builder Arnold Schwarzenegger is kept on file to provide another metaphor. Explains Holmes: "Some day the dollar is going to have muscle again." Such imagination has not gone unnoticed by TIME'S readers. Last December a fan in Pasadena, Calif., commended Holmes' "creative outlook in communicating the vital statistics of the news" and respectfully nominated him for Man of the Year.

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