FREE Infographic Holiday Cards (LIMITED SUPPLY)

As they have for the past few years, our friends at FUNNEL have reserved 50 sets of FREE Infographic Holiday Cards just for readers of Cool Infographics!  (U.S. and Canada addresses only)  This year’s design is called “Snowplowed” (image above), and includes a 4-card pack that are blank on the inside.  You must request your free cards by Wednesday, December 21st!

Funnel’s Holiday Card Packs are ready to ship to clients, friends and fans of information design to show our appreciation. To get your free 4-card pack featuring this year’s illustration “Snowplowed” follow the link to our holiday sign up page at http://www.funnelinc.com/holiday/ (US/Canada only, while supplies last, offer good until 12/21/11). For all our wonderful fans around the world, please enjoy our free wallpapers to dress up your iPhone or monitor. Cheers!

Supplies are very limited, so when you enter your information, make sure you select “Cool Infographics Blog” under “How did you hear about us?” to get some of the cards reserved for you.

While you’re on the FUNNEL site, check out the FREE wallpaper images for iPhones and Monitors!

Thanks to Lin and Lori at FUNNEL for this special treat just for Cool Infographics readers!

Project Prediction: Demystifying Parametric Cost Estimation

Project Prediction: Demystifying Parametric Cost Estimation is a new infographic from Galorath.com, and is really an advertisement for their Seer service.

Infographics have a huge potential for use in advertisements, brochures, product packaging, etc.  This one started off nicely with minimal text, using icons and illustrations of the different product abilities, but fell apart into a whole lot of text at the end.

I’m pretty sure I still don’t understand what “Parametric Cost Estimation” does.

The Anatomy of an Agency

The Anatomy of an Agency from Grip Limited is a tongue-in-cheek cool infographic about the roles within an advertising agency.

Agencies are famously diverse.  We have examined a few of their species and have drawn some arbitrary conclusions.

Designed by Grip’s own Julia Morra and Trevor Gourley.

Carbonite Small Business Disasters

Infographics as advertisments have a lot of potential.  In this one about Small Business Disasters, Carbonite.com has shared the results of research they performed with small businesses.

What would your small business do if your computers were stolen or destroyed? Would your important data still exist? In April, Carbonite surveyed small businesses with between two and 20 employees to study their disaster recovery and data backup methods. We found that almost half of small businesses have already lost irreplaceable data.

The design does suffer a little from the large-font-syndrome that tries to make the numbers really large instead of visualizing them, but there are a number of good, simple visualizations included in the infographic.

The design also seems like something is missing at the top.  No title, company logo or anything to indicated what this infographic is about.  That’s espeically important because infographics can be heavily shared and have a life of their own on the Internet, separate from any text or explanation that the origianl company posts along with it.

I will say that I LOVE Carbonite as a customer!

The Value of Data Visualization [video]

The Value of Data Visualization is a cool motion graphic used as an advertisement for infographic design services from our friends at Column Five Media.  The short video does a really good job of showing the viewer a few good examples of why visual information can be easier to comprehend.

They say knowledge is power, but how do we make knowledge powerful? The challenge of communicating information becomes especially difficult when trying to convey a message full of complex data, which is often difficult to interpret quickly and clearly to the naked eye. This motion graphic looks at some of the many visual techniques used by Column Five to communicate information effectively to a large audience.

 The video is now also available on YouTube:

The 20 Most Expensive AdWords on Google

Where’s Google Making Its Money? is a great example of using data that your company has to showcase your services.  This one is from WordStream, and they analyzed their own keyword database to find the most expensive keywords from AdWords over a 90-day period.

From WordStream:

On the heels of Google’s blow-out Q2 2011 earnings announcement last week, we wanted to find out the most expensive keywords - what keywords demand the highest costs per click and are most competitive in terms of high search volume. Since the vast majority of Google’s profits come from AdWords advertising, these high CPC keyword categories are responsible for a large part of Google’s profits.

From TechCrunch:

WordStream, a venture capital-backed provider of hosted software that automates most of the manual work involved with creating and optimizing both paid and natural search engine marketing campaigns, has done some research to discover which keyword categories fetch the highest costs per click (CPC) in Google’s AdWords solution.

And of course, they made an infographic based on the results of their research

Found on Chart Porn and The Big Picture.

Demand Media - Breaking the Bank

Demand Media - Breaking the Bank is a cool infographic published on OnlineMBA.com by designer Ricky Linn.

The content itself in interesting, and I remember reading the Wired article listed in the sources.  I like that the infographic combines the process flow of content creation, but also visualizes relevant statistics about how big and profitable Demand Media has become.  Overall it tells a good story.

Found on SiliconValleyWatcher.

Monster Trade Show Displays (infographic)

From Monster Displays, a trade show displays reseller, the Trade Show Displays infographic is a great example of how companies are beginning to use infographics more for business communcations.  Most of the infographics posted here on Cool Infographics are intended to be shared far and wide through social media, but you never see the infographics that companies use internally or as part of their sales presentations.

This may not be the best infographic design (there’s too much text for my tastes), but it is what I would call data-heavy.  The infographic “shows” the reader the different types of displays, where they are used in a trade show, standard sizes, configurations and even includes an explanation of the mathematical effect of advertising lag.  I think they felt they needed to over-explain each illustration with words, and they have some statistics that they didn’t visualize at all.

Trade shows and trade show displays have a science behind them that most casual visitors never see. This infographic begins to explain some of the basics that every trade show attendee and trade show presenter should be aware of. What are the types of trade show booths? What layouts are available for the presenter? What advantages does trade show marketing have over other advertising campaigns? Learn more about the decay effect and advertising lag and how trade show advertising is affected.

This would also make a nice poster, or a handout to give to customers because it provides a good reference of information that customers would refer back to.

Thanks to Shell for sending in the link!

BT Financial Infographic Commercials

BT Financial Australia created a series of video commercials called The Bigger Picture using florescent light tubes to animate growth charts in the infographic ads.

I’m very impressed that the design group BT used, The Glue Society, went out looking for a visual way to convey the data that was interesting, but also created a unique look for BT.

They also published a cool Making-Of video looking behind the scenes at setting up the physical light structures and filming the ad spots.

Found on Information Aesthetics and Fast Company.

A (Future) Day of Glass

A Day of Glass video of the future from Corning Glass.  A lot of augmented reality and infographics in our daily lives of the future…