What About Me? - Intel's Infographic Generator

Intel has released What About Me?, an automatic infographic generator that connects to your own Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts to create a profile infographic about you.

Social media users know that discovery is half the fun. With What about Me? you can capture a snapshot of your social media life and create your own colorful image, full of clues and facts about one of the most fascinating subjects in the world — YOU!

In general, I’m not a fan of automatically generated infographics.  I find them repetitive, like PowerPoint templates, and that makes everyone’s information look the same.  This one at least incorporates a few photos of your own to give a little personal touch, but not much.

From a design perspective, the “About Me” section is the big central visual element.  I like the color spectrum and the simple icons used for the dominant categories.  It may be just my own data, but all of the percentages are small and fairly close to each other, so visually you don’t see much difference at all.  Am I really that well balanced???

In the “How I put it out there” section, the bars are all portions of the total 100%, so a pie chart or a stacked bar would have been a better chart style to use in the design.  Again, in the “When I clock in” section, these two values are portions of the total 100%, so some type of visualization that shows that would have been helpful to the reader.

I really like the simplicity of the “My Mood” section, and I think they actually made it too small in this design.  As a completely visual element it could reall be much larger and more prominent.  I would really like to have some type of editing capability, like choosing which images are included.

I think they setup the sharing function poorly.  You can save a JPG file of your own design (like mine above) to your own computer.  If you share on Facebook or Twitter it will post the infographic as a photo in your account, but the link it generates will just take someone else back to the front page to design their own.  That’s confusing because the link should be sharing your own design with others, so they would have the option to like or share your design.

If you create your own design, share post the link to your image in the comments!

Found on Mashable

The Health Benefits of Guinness vs. Beer

The Health Benefits of Guinness vs. Beer is a new infographic from the team at GoIreland.com.  Primarily focused on calories, this infographic does a good job at visualizing comparisons.

We at GoIreland have rustled up a useful infographic about Guinness and other beers. But not just any infographic about booze. We recognize that folks in the 21^st century are more health conscious than ever, so have combined these two facets to look at the health benefits of Guinness vs. other types of beer.

Whether you enjoy the dark stuff, or lean towards lager, the results show that a pint of one, or the other, can have positive effects on various areas of the body, such as the heart, bones and even your skin. Through painstaking research, we even worked out how many individual peanuts each drink is the equivalent to eating, how long it would take to burn off those calories and taken a look at some of the strongest beers known to mankind.

This infographic is really well designed, and it’s focused on one of my favorite drinks in the world!  The visual comparison between Guinness and a handful of light beers is clear and easy to read.  However, when they start comparing to “Regular Beer” it’s unclear what brand they are using as the average beer and where that data comes from.  I like the Running and Dancing comparisons that are fun and make understanding the differences easier to an average reader.

The only visualization error I see is the circles on the world map.  Circles have to be sized by their AREA, so if we assume the Ireland circle is the correct baseline, then the circles for values of 0.06 and 0.02 would only be a couple pixels wide.  The circles in the design are shown larger than their actual values, which is a false visualization.

At the bottom, I wish there was a URL to the original landing page for readers to get back to the original, and some form of copyright statement.

Thanks to Oli for sending in the link!

Here is an alternate, shorter and in my opinion “better” version.  What do you think?

 

Brand Madness! Social Media Bracketology

Brand Madness! Using Bracketology to Crown a Social Media Champion is a fun infographic design during the NCAA basketball tournament that uses social media scores to determine winning match-ups.  From UltimateCoupons.com, this design is a great example of taking boring data (Facebook likes and Twitter followers are available to anyone) and using infographic design to make it fun and engaging to the readers.

March Madness has officially arrived, but the UltimateCoupons.com team has Brand Madness! While everyone else’s mind is on basketball, we decided to fill out a bracket pitting 32 of the world’s most popular brand names against each other with the winners and losers being decided by social media popularity.

This is a great use of the visual company logos and the bracket structure to show the readers all of the match-ups, and you can look closer to see the actual numbers if you want to.  Only a year or two ago, this type of blog post would have been all text and a table of numbers, but this is a simple and very effective use of design to grab the readers’ attention.

Thanks to Scarlett for sending in the link!

Client Infographic: Streamlining your Digital Life with the new iPad

With the Apple event last week announcing the release of the new iPad, the Streamlining your Digital Life with the new iPad infographic from NextWorth takes a look at the history of the electronic devices that the iPad has replaced in our lives.  A true multifunctional device, the iPad has replaced many of our separate gadgets.

The digital world is converging on a revolutionary all-in-one device, the powerful, brand-new iPad. These are the iconic portable devices that led to (and are to some extent being replaced by) Apple’s innovation.

The lines are color coded to connect the types of devices in the timeline, and show any devices that had multiple functions of their own (like the Eee PC 701).  Using a treemap in the iPad image, it also shows the amount of time spent using the different functions on the iPad from average consumers.  The use of illustrations instead of photographs of all these devices keeps the design simple and focused on communicating the data.

Finally, using their own internal data, an assortment of prices are shown of the current maximum values that consumers can get by trading in their now-obsolete gadgets.  With a handful of the right gadgets, you could easily get enough money back to pay for a brand new iPad!

All of the essential information is included in the design: data sources, brand logo, URL of the original high-resolution infographic landing page, company logo, copyright statement and even a mention of the designer (nice job Jeremy!).

This was an infographic design from my own company, InfoNewt, and of course, the team at NextWorth was fantastic to work with!

Romance Reboot: Safe Online Dating Tips from ADT

What did you do for Valentines day? Did you go on a date? Did you meet them online? The Romance Reboot: Safe Online Dating Tips from ADT infographic from homesecuritysource.com provides tips for the 5.5 million singles who use online dating on how to stay safe while finding their true love!

This one is cool because of the new, innovative way to animate the infographic.  You’ll have to view it on the original posting to see it, but the illustrations and visualizations are animated as you slowly scroll down the page.  This design itself is too gaudy for my tastes, but BIG kudos to the designers for trying something new to push the envelope of infographic design!

The bottom is missing the URL for the original posting, which is a big mistake because it makes it hard for readers to find the cool animated version.  It’s also missing a copyright statement and any mention of the designer(s).

Thanks to Andrew for sending in the infographic!

10 Irish Inventions that Changed the World

With St. Patrick’s Day coming up this weekend, I thought i would share the 10 Irish Inventions that Changed the World infographic from GoIreland.com explores 10 of the greatest Irish inventions ever.

Ireland: The land of saints and scholars, right? Well, sort-of. Whatever about saints, this little island has certainly produced its fair share of clever clogs. For a country that makes no secret of some pretty audacious claims to fame (we even tried to claim that Barack Obama guy as one of our own!!), we have been remarkably quiet about some outstanding Irish inventions.

Modern chemistry? Tick. Color photography? Tick. Both Irish inventions, and, as you can see from the infographic, there are many more. And when it comes to refreshing beverages, it’s not just Guinness that should come to mind. Raise a toast to soda water and chocolate milk, both Irish inventions to rival the black stuff.

Certainly more narrative than data visualizations, but they picked some fun and interesting inventions to include.  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the sequence of events; they’re certainly not in chronological order.  I did notice that in the Atomic Bomb section, the visualization for 600,000 Volts actually shows 800,000 Volts.

Three things are missing from the bottom of the design: a copyright statement, the URL where readers can find the original infographic landing page and credit to the designer(s).

Thanks to Aidan for sending in the link!

The Learning Power of LEGO

The Learning Power of LEGO infographic from onlinecollege.org brings to light the uses of LEGOs in education as well as a brief history of Lego Bricks.

Lego is a range of construction toys first created by Ole Kirk Christiansen in the 1940s in Denmark. Beginning as a set of stackable, interlocking blocks, Lego has evolved into the company’s global flagship product of colorful plastic pieces that can be assembled and re-assembled in infinite ways. The blocks are so popular with children that LEGO has designed educational products and curricula, and teachers are using them in their classrooms.

This is a bright and colorful design, just like LEGOs themselves. Easy to follow the information down the page, but uses too much text in my opinion.

The second section, Statistics, should have used some data visualizations to show the numbers visually. I think they missed an opportunity here to use Legos themselves to visualize the numbers. Hidden in here is the idea that LEGO should be considered the World’s Largest Producer of Tires (which I find astonishing), and a quick visual looking at the world's tire companies would have been great!

The bottom does a good job listing the data sources and the producing company logo, but is missing a URL to the original infographic posting and some type of copyright statement.

Thanks to Stella for sending in the link!

Rock of Ages: The Evolution of SxSW

Rock of Ages: The Evolution of SxSW from Music Festival to Interactive Launch Pad is a new infographic from Rocksauce Studios just in time for SxSW 2012 this weekend.

Since 1987, SXSW has morphed into an interactive, film and music conference and festival that brought together 19,364 attendees in 2011.

Austin-based app development firm, Rocksauce Studios, has created an infographic that dissects the interactive portion of SXSW, and proves why this conference is the new popular techie playground.  

The topics and cited statistics covered in “The Evolution of SXSW from Music Festival to Interactive Launch Pad” include:

- History of SXSW
- 2011 Attendance Demographics
- Top 10 Types of Business of Interactive Registrants  
- Geographic Breakdown of Total Interactive Registrants
- Successful SXSW Startup Launches
- Recent SXSW Web Awards  / Interactive Awards Winners
- Reasons So Many Companies Chose to Launch at SXSW
- The Accelerator

You can read more about the development of the infographic on Silicon Angle

This design does a really good job with the visual basics.  Showing the icons/logos of the startup companies, illustrating the business types, mapping the conference registrants. The overall design tells a good story top-to-bottom to the readers, and it’s easy to follow the flow of information.

Three things stood out to me that could be improved:

• There are a lot of data values in the text of the timeline that should have been visualized.
• The three shapes showing the amount of Interactive Conference Participants, Conference Sessions and Interactive Media in Attendance all of different values, but the shapes are not sized to match those values.
• The last section “The Accelerator” seems to fall apart as all text, even though there are some good data values there that should have been visualized.

Thanks to Kelly for sending in the link!

Airbnb's Global Growth

Airbnb has released a fantastic infographic, Airbnb’s Global Growth, sharing their own stats about their phenominal growth from August 2008 to February 2012.

Airbnb started in Brian and Joe’s San Francisco apartment. Today, more than five million nights have been booked on Airbnb. And although Airbnb’s roots are in the USA, more than 75% of all reservations last year were international - where either the traveler or host (or both!) was outside the United States. Check out our infographic celebrating the international growth that you’ve powered.

I think an infographic is a great way for a company to share it’s story with it’s executives, it’s shareholders, the press and the public in general.  Infographics are visual storytelling, and every company has a story to tell.

The design is beautiful!  They’ve included a wide variety of data visualization types: area chart, doughnut chart, maps, bars and illustrations.  The one complaint I have is that too many of the stats are just shown in large text.  Large fonts don’t make good data visualizations.

They made an interesting choice and included the URL for a separate page on their website about the Airbnb service, instead of linking back to the original infographic.  I know they want to promote their service, but I think this is a mistake, because a reader has to search through their blog posts to find the infographic.  A couple things missing from the bottom: a copyright statement and credit to the designer.

Thanks to Slavik for sending in the link!

The Genealogy of Automobile Companies

A brand new infographic poster designed by Larry Gormley at HistoryShots.com!  The Genealogy of U.S. Automobile Companies visualizes over 100 years or corporate history of car company mergers, acquisitions and closures.

A flowing history of more than 100 automobile companies across the complete time span of the automobile industry. From 1900 to 1925 over 3,300 organizations were formed to produce automobiles in the United States. In 1910 alone 400 new startups entered the industry. Most attempts lasted less than two years. While car sales exploded (from 1910 to 2010 US sales rose from 200,000 to 11.5 million cars) the strongest entrepreneurs bought out rivals and combined forces. Today, ten companies account for about 90% of all US automobile sales.

This graphic uncovers and explains how the industry was created and how it arrived at its present form. At the core is a full genealogy of over 100 companies from the Big Five to the small defunct companies. Folded into the genealogy is the relative market share of US sales for each company.

The Big Five car companies have unique colors, and all of the other companies are color-coded into categories of he trest of the Top 20, defunct companies and other interesting or famous companies.  The thickness of the lines change over time to represent market share.

You can buy a copy of the 38” x 23” poster for $29.95 over at HistoryShots.com

Thanks to Larry for sending in the link!  Great design!