What is a Stock?

What is a Stock? from Mint.com explains what stock ownership is.  It’s informative to the readers (a little text heavy), and doesn’t come across like an ad.

To make investment choices that ultimately pay off, you need to start by knowing the fundamentals. It’s a step many investor wannabes skip, since… well, studying the basic terms and trends is not exactly entertaining. We thought one way of helping you get a jumpstart on your basic investing terminology is a series of infographics that explain, visually, basic concepts. First up: what is a stock?

This is a good example of what I call the Online Lifespan of an infographic.  Instead of an infographic about a recent news topic, this one covers an informational topic that doesn’t change or drop out of the news cycle.  It’s more than a year old, but the information is still relevant, and continues to drive traffic for Mint.  This design probably has an Online Lifespan for 4-5 years before the Dow Jones chart at the bottom makes the whole infographic feel dated.

What’s the line chart in the middle?  It’s a timeline, but the height of the line chart has no meaning whatsoever.  This should have shown some type of information, but instead is just confusing to the reader.

Thanks to Dawn for sending in the link!

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!