I really wish I could make it to the See Conference (The Conference on Visualization of Information) in Germany (www.see-conference.org). This year looks like they have a great conference lined up!
For eighth years now the see conference has been gathering the most creative people and exciting ideas on the topic of information visualization. The interdisciplinary platform brings together fields like design, art, architecture and new technologies. Our international speakers will show the latest ideas and approaches on how to deal with the current flood of information, on how to visualize it and turn it into something that can be experienced. Among our new speakers at see#8: Data journalist Francesco Franchi, Dutch design studio Catalogtree and British-born Antony Turner from Carbon Visuals. More info regarding program and tickets at www.see-conference.org.
Event: see conference #8 Date: 20 April 2013 Location: Wiesbaden, Germany URL: www.see-conference.org
If you have a chance to make it to this conference, I would highly recommend it. When I looked today, there were only 161 seats left!
Let me know what you think if you make it to the conference!
Here at Shutterstock, if there’s one thing we obsess over as much as inspiring imagery, it’s data. Add that to the fact that we license more images than anyone else, and you have a recipe for some pretty insightful trend forecasting.
We created our first design-trends infographic last year; this time, we took things up a notch, incorporating a lot more data, a lot more images, and a more in-depth look at what we see heating up in the year ahead.
Check out the full infographic, then read on for 10 of our own favorite takeaways.
The use of stock vectors, especially for data visualizations, is on a huge upward trend as more and more people are designing their own infographics and data visualizations. I am very excited about this trend, as people are breaking away from the chart templates in MS Office to visualize their new data in new and different ways.
I would prefer to see all of the statistics visualized using the stock vector data visualizations from Shutterstock. That would have been more in line with the growth trend they are showing. Much better than just showing the numbers in text they way they have in this design.
The footer of the infographic is missing both a copyright statement (or Creative Commons license), and the URL directly to the blog post with the high-resolution infographic. The URL they did include is just to the main blog page, and six months from now the infographic will be buried in the past blog posts.
Rocksauce Studios has released SxSW 2013, an infographic looking at the basic statistics and demographic data around this year’s South By Southwest conference in Austin , TX.
The seven SXSW events — gaming expo, interactive, film, trade show, music, music gear expo and flatstock — attracted an audience of more than 300,000 last year (though only a sliver were badge holders). The PDF offers an attendance breakdown.
Demographics: the largest percentage of attendees are between the ages of 31 and 40; 86 percent of registrants are from the U.S.; 60 percent of attendees are male; and 29 percent of festival goers work in the creative industries.
Five companies to see success with SXSW include Foursquare, Twitter, Gamesalad, Phonebooth and Foodspotting.
The 2013 SXSW festival runs March 8-17.
300,000 attendees last year, and this year looks to be even bigger! Not sure why they released it as a huge, high-resolution PDF file, but the you can download it here.
HEY! I’m headed down to Austin on Friday for SxSW, so I would love to hear from anyone else headed down there as well. Should we have an infographics meetup?
Manhattan Building Hieghts by radicalcartography.net is an indirect measure of land value based on building height. The infographic is shaped like Manhattan itself, and the actual building’s color darkness shows their heights in their correct locations.
You can also see an alternate design using assessed tax value as the data set, and how that maps out land value differently.
On February 12, 2013, President Obama gave his annual State of the Union speech, but this year it was “enhanced” with charts, data visualizations and additional information in a sidebar of the display (full video above). The team at NPR (@nprapps) published a great review a few days later called Chart Check: Did Obama’s Graphics ‘Enhance’ His Big Speech? They also included opinions from a couple of the best data visualization experts Stephen Few (PerceptualEdge.com) and Nathan Yau (FlowingData.com)
I will say that I think the use of the charts was very successful and does make the President’s speech more effective. By their very nature, the charts imply that the President has data behind his message, and that can be a very persuasive, compelling tactic. You’ll also notice the wide array of chart styles so they are each memorable for different topics in the speech. We didn’t get 27 bar charts, because the audience wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart after the speech. We got different data visualizations for different types of data. Stacked bars, line charts, area charts and grids colored icons.
The key frame from the video (above) is what first caught my eye. This is the still image shown before you start playing the video. I was instantly concerned about all of the charts after seeing this one about Deficit Reduction. It may be because I work with data visualizations every day, but I could see instantly that the chart was wrong. How can the $500 Billion part of the stacked bar be larger than the $600 Billion part? That can’t be right! Seriously, I look at this stuff all the time, and this jumps out at me in a big way. Welcome to my life.
Here’s the full chart:
One of the biggest risks with data visualizations and infographics is what I call the Risk of Negative Impression. The idea is that while good visuals can quickly leave a good impression with your audience, if your visualizations are incorrect or flawed, you can leave a bad impression just as quickly and effectively. The audience thinks, “if they messed up this chart, why should I trust anything else they have to say?” Then they feel like they have to carefully scrutinize every chart, and you have lost all credibility with your audience.
The NPR piece does a great job of breaking down 14 of the 27 charts from the speech, and even created some corrected charts to show a more realistic real visualization of the data. I highly recommend you read the whole article on the NPR site.
I’ll mention one more example. By visualizing data, the designer adds context and bias to the information. The best designers try to minimize the bias, but even the choices about what data to include in the visualization help frame the audience’s understanding. One common way to skew perception of the data is to change the scale of one or both of the axes. A number of slides from the speech don’t start at zero, so the chart exaggerates the changes. This is a common practice when charting stock values so the audience can see the small changes, but they often make the changes feel much bigger than they actually are. That was the intent with this chart that only shows the range of values from 400,000 to 550,000.
Stephen Few redesigned this corrected chart for the NPR piece, and I think he nailed it. By expanding the y-axis to start at 0, he puts the changes over time into a different perspective for the audience.
The White House has published all of the 107 slides as a scribd.com presentation:
Rami Moghadam has just published two infographic posters detailing the stats for each of the players on the NBA All-Star teams. 2013 NBA All-Stars East and 2013 NBA All-Stars West both use radar charts to highlight each player’s strongest areas.
The individual radar charts are color-coded for each player’s regular team. In the radar charts, you have to look at each stat to determine which direction is a favorable number. A high number of turnovers isn’t a good thing, so I might suggest reversing the direction of some of the negative stats like fouls and turnovers.
Good job Rami, and thanks for sending in the link!
Last week design firm JESS3 released The Geosocial Universe 3.0, an update to their prior infographics about the size of the major social media networks.
In a time not so long ago, in a galaxy not so far away, a little phenomenon was born that united the people of cyberspace through geographic services and social networking.
With changes to the social landscape occurring at lightspeed, JESS3 presents its third iteration of The Geosocial Universe, charting the latest monthly active user data for various social networks, along with the percentage of users who access each network via mobile devices.
Take a look below to discover more about the ever-expanding geosocial universe and the course of its objects.
I really like the changes to this version of the design. They kept the same philosophy of relatively sized circles to represent each of the main social networks. However, I’m confused by the placement of the Black Hole on the vertical scale meant to represent the percentage of mobile users. Why does more mobile users place a network closer to the Black Hole of Obscurity? It’s placement around the 80% mark visually implies that has meaning, but I don’t think that was the intention of the design. Is Facebook close to obscurity?
Both a copyright (or Creative Commons) license and the URL to the infographic landing page are missing from the design. You want readers to be able to find their way back to the original when they find the infographic posted on other sites.
Very cool! You have to check out Philippe Dubost’s (phildub) resume site. Completely designed to emulate an Amazon product page, down to the smallest details. Many of the links work nicely, taking you to a contact form or details on his LinkedIN profile page. Things like his Product Dimensions, Only 1 Available, Star ratings and frustration-free packaging from France. Even a Google Ad, similar to the ads on actual Amazon pages.
Certainly creative, I wondered if this should be considered an infographic resume. I ended up convincing myself that “Yes” I do consider it to be infographic because it visualizes Philippe’s information in a way that is recognizable and easier to read and understand to the audience. Star Ratings, key features, product photos and recommendations. The visuals do bring meaning to the information, even though it’s done in a fun and amusing way. It doesn’t have to be a chart of numerical data to be infographic.
Series of info graphics for brockhaus, a large encyclopedia publisher from germany. The info graphics visualize several statistics and informations of topics like: the worlds highest mountains and their first ascent, the languages of the world, comets close to the earth, world oceans, ecology, media evolution and so on. One graphic shows the evolution of the world population from 1950 to 2050. Six transparent pages (one for each 20-year period) overlap each other.
These are some beautiful designs. I’m sorry an English version isn’t available.
Eric Enge, Author and SEO GuruRecently, I had an amazing opportunity to interview Eric Enge about SEO & Infographics. Eric has incredible insight in the world of SEO as a consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur.
Eric Enge is the CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, a consulting company that provides a full range of Internet marketing optimization services including: strategic business planning, on page search engine optimization, link building, content optimization, conversion optimization, social media optimization, user engagement, and pay-per-click campaign development and optimization. Eric is co-author of the book The Art of SEO, a speaker at numerous search marketing events, and a contributing author to Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, and SEOmoz.
The interview covers some of the hottest topics that impact the infographics design industry today:
Infographics as part of a content marketing strategy
How Google’s changes to their algorithm impacts infographics
Infographics relevance and accuracy
Using attribution links, anchor text and embed code for infographics
Infographics on Pinterest
You can read the complete interview on the InfoNewt blog
Randy
