The Designer's Toolkit: The Most Popular Design Tools

BestVendor.com recently released The Designer’s Toolkit, an infographic showing the results of a survey with 180 design professionals about the software they use to perform their magic.

What are the most popular tools and apps used by designers? We were curious, so we pulled together data based on 180 design and creative professionals who use BestVendor. Below is an infographic showing results across a range of product categories, from invoicing to wireframing. We also included a few design tools considered hidden gems and rising stars among this audience. One observation: Designers’ powerhouse tools like the Adobe Suite remain on the desktop, but more than half of their favorite apps are in the cloud.

Although 180 designers isn’t enough to be quantitative, statistically accurate results, I really like the overall design layout and the stacked bar style with the most used software on top of each chart.  Easy to read and compare between categories.  However, I don’t understand the color choices (shouldn’t they be related to each software brand color?), and I think it would have looked better with the application icons in the chart.

If you’re interested, you can see the software I use on BestVendor here.

Found on FastCo Design

The Money Chart

The Money Chart from Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd.com is a huge poster showing the scope and scale of money flowing all over the world.  In a great move for transparency, the entire list of over 200 sources is also online.

You can view it through the online, zoomable viewer OR get the super high-resolution image file!  The 36”x24” printed poster version will be available starting in December for $15.00.

This is the poster version of comic #980, which is a guide to money. It started as a project to understand taxes and government spending, and turned into a rather extensive research project. With upwards of 200 sources and 150,000 tiny boxes, it’s best appreciated in poster form. The 36”x24” high-quality poster print allows you to stand back and, all at once, take in the entire world economy.

Each square represents one unit of the specific section it’s in.  One dollar, One million dollars, One trillion dollars, etc.  To provide some scale, each section is then visualized to scale in the next higher section.  Here’s the transition from dollars to thousands.

Found on Infosthetics, ChartPorn and FlowingData

Design The Future - Infographic Design Contest!

Calling All Infographic Designers!

Hosted here on Cool Infographics, PosterBrain.com is sponsoring the Design The Future infographic contest for the best Utopia or Doomsday infographic poster.  The grand prize will be a 16GB iPad2.  Plus random prizes will be awarded throughout, no matter what everyone will get something.  Instead of giving you a subject for the infographic we will provide the data and you will create your own subject.  Data MUST be pulled this data spreadsheet available on Google Docs.  THIS IS THE ONLY SOURCE you can gather data for your infographic from.  Judging will be based on creativity, aesthetics, clarity and the story that your infographic tells.

Contest will end when they receive 50 Entries!  So act fast!

Of course you can create you own illustrations and visualizations, but DepositPhotos.com is offering a free, PROMO CODE to all designer participants.  This promo code gets you FIVE FREE images to use in your design!

Click here for all of the Official Contest Page with of the details.

Once you submit your entry, 33% of the judging criteria will be on how many people “LIKE” your image on our Facebook contest page.  Once you email in your entry, PosterBrain will post them on the Facebook page so you can start gathering LIKEs.

Everyone is encouraged to enter, so even if you have never designed an infographic before, this is your opprtunity.  Plus, PosterBrain will be awarding some random prizes to participants

Update on Friday, November 25, 2011 at 4:41PM by Randy

Open to international entries!

The contest sponsor (PosterBrain) has heard the the comments about restricting the contest to U.S. residents, and has now modified the rules to allow entries from around the world!  See the Official Rules for details!

Broken Appliances: Repair or Replace?

PartSelect.com brings us a cool, interactive infographic that helps customers evaluate what to do with their Broken Appliances: Repair or Replace?  Obviously a design from an appliance parts retailer showing customers why they should buy repair parts instead of replacing their appliances, but it’s really good information and doesn’t feel like a hard sell.  It is actually very valuable information for consumers.

We created this diagnostic infographic to troubleshoot some of the common problems that affect household appliances. Clicking on the pulsing dots shows each common issue and the parts required to correct the problem. Many people replace an entire appliance, which is neither cost-effective nor environmentally responsible. We displayed the average cost of replacing the appliance as well as the cost of the parts required to fix the problem (and a scale of the difficulty of the repair).

I really like the design that places the replacement parts radially around the applicances.  The color coding for cost and difficulty also works well, but it would have been better without the legend (“Legends are Evil”).  Without the 1-2-3 as the text in the arc, it could have easily said Easy-Difficult-Very Difficult in the arcs.

Apparently the length of the arcs doesn’t have any meaning, although it looks like it should.  They are just designed long enough to fit the text and the images.

Figure 1 - Layering of the symptoms animation

In addition, PartSelect posted a lengthy, thorough post about the interactive infographic development process they went through.  This is fantastic!  While I may not agree with all of the decisions they made along the way, this type of transparency and under-the-hood information is what helps build credibility and trust with customers.

The Interactive Infographic Process

The process now looks like:

1. Project Manager decides to make an infographic with some data.
2. Project Manager brings on board a Programmer and Designer.
3. Project Manager must decide on the balance of technology vs audience, based on discussions with the team.
4. Designer fleshes out some rough concepts.
5. The team meets to discuss; each has specific input:
   1. Project Manager: vision and potential target audiences.
   2. Designer: design concepts and how to make it clean.
   3. Programmer: what is possible. Ideas based on what the technology can do which PM and designer may not be aware of.
6. Designer creates fleshed out design.
7. Team meets again and iterates over designs until everybody happy.
8. Programmer puts together technical spec on how it will be built, which will influence deliverables from designer.
9. Designer sends across deliverables decided by programmer.
10. Programmer builds the first functional version.
11. Team meets and probably iterates and refines design in same process.

Thanks to Stephen for sending in the link!

How Did We Get to 7 Billion People So Fast?

I love the cool infographic video from NPR.  7 Billion: How Did We Get So Big So Fast? is a video that uses colored liquids to visualize the population rates of the differen continents.  High birth rates mean fast liquid pouring in, slower death rates slow down the liquid dripping out of the bottom.

The U.N. estimates that the world’s population will pass the 7 billion mark on Monday. [Oct 31st]

As NPR’s Adam Cole reports, it was just over two centuries ago that the global population was 1 billion — in 1804. But better medicine and improved agriculture resulted in higher life expectancy for children, dramatically increasing the world population.

Found on FlowingData

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.

Animated History of the iPhone

CNET UK brings us this infographic video, The Animated History of the iPhone.  I love this style of animated, infographic video, and they did a great job with this one.  Some of the data goes by quickly, but that just means you’ll have to watch it again.

What’s better than an infographic? A video infographic, that’s what. In anticipation of the announcement of the iPhone 5, currently tipped to be on 4 October, we’ve made a gorgeous animated video charting the history of the iPhone. (Editor’s note: this turned out to be the iPhone 4S, so have a look at our preview while you’re here)

We’ve divided the iPhone into its component parts and charted how the technological and design developments of the past few decades have influenced the look, feel and features of the different models so far. If you want to know what connects the Walkman to Tim Berners-Lee to the NeXTcube, you’ve come to the right place.

We’ve seen previous, popular videos in this design style (like the music video to Remind Me by Royksopp and the Little Red Riding Hood project).  In fact the brief image of the world map in the iPhone video looks like the same illustration as the Royksopp video.  It just highlights California instead of the UK.  If you’re going to be inspired by an infographic video, they picked one of my favorites.

Found posted on Facebook by Griffin Technologies.

Also now available on YouTube:

Backyard Sports Court Dimensions

What a great use of an infographic!  From LandscapingNetwork.com comes The Guide to Backyard Sports Court Dimensions.

Get common court dimensions for basketball, horseshoes, shuffleboard, bocce ball, badminton, volleyball and tennis.

The topic is perfect to drive links and traffic to a landscaping site.  People are always looking up these dimensions, and by covering all seven of these in one infographic, this will attract views for years to come.  I was looking up the basketball free throw line dimension just last week!

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:

US/China Trade Infographic [Making-of Video]

Back in 2009 Jess Bachman designed the Visualizing the US/China Trade infographic for Mint.com.  This design uses a sankey diagram visual that has line widths representing the relative size of all the country values.

Like it or not, the US and China have a trading relationship that has global repercussions. The plastic US flags that say Made in China don’t tell the whole story. No, not everything is made in China. In fact the US manufactures and exports almost as much as China but it consumes a great deal more. Hence, the trade imbalance. What’s interesting is exactly what the US imports, stuff like machinery and toys and as much steel and iron as it does shoes. And what we export — high-tech stuff like airplanes and medical equipment and, for some reason, 7 billion dollars worth of oleaginous fruit which is used to make cooking oil, presumably for Chinese food.

A cool infographic all by itself, but even better is that Jess captured screen shots every 10 seconds automatically using Snagit (a process he calls flowcapping), and recently put them together into a behind-the-scenes video and blog post showing his design process.  10-hours of design work, compressed down into a couple minutes.  View the high-resolution version if you can so you can actually read what’s on the screen.  This is the short version.

And the longer, 7-minute version let’s you see even more details behind his process.

Jess (ByJess.net) is best known for his annual Death & Taxes infographic poster of the U.S. Federal Budget, and recently joined the team at Visual.ly as Creative Director.  Great job Jess, and thanks for sharing your process with the world!