How Does A Touchscreen Phone Work?

This is the reason why your iPhone won’t work with gloves but your Samsung U600 will! The How Does A Touchscreen Phone Work? infographic from mycricket.com compares phones with the three different types of touch screens. 

Ever wonder why some touch screen phones cost more than others? Or why you can’t seem to get the touch screen on your smartphone to work if you’re wearing a glove? Most people don’t know that there are three different types of touch screen technologies available: resistive, capacitive, and infrared. Learn about the different benefits and capabilities to make sure you get the touch screen phone you’re looking for.

This is a really good comparison infographic design.  Each feature is clearly illustrated for the reader, the text descriptions are minimal and it’s very easy to read top-to-bottom.

I had trouble finding the original because the URL link to the original landing page was not included at the bottom of the design (always include the URL!), and there should be some type of copyright or Creative Common license.  Not really a problem, but I’m surprised the design doesn’t include any mention of the Cricket Wireless brand or logo.

Thanks to Sam for sending in the link!

Life of a Cask: Wine to Whiskey

 

Wow! Who knew that the Cask would be so valuable! It is a key ingredient to making our favorite wine and whiskeys! See how Scotch depends on Sherry in the infographic Life of a Cask: Wine to Whiskey from winefolly.com.

An infographic on the life of a cask, from wine to whiskey. Find out where casks start their life and see how Scotch is dependent on Sherry.

Cask Facts

• Used wine barrels are in high demand for Scotch and whisky production.
• Distilleries prefer Oloroso Sherry casks and other dessert wine casks such as Port and Sauternes for aging whisky.
• Sherry producers use larger casks called Hogheads (250 L) and Butts (500 L).
• Some distilleries own forests in America where they source quercus alba (white oak) to produce casks.
• Distilleries often loan unused casks to Sherry producers to ‘season’ them.

A Single malt Scotch cask ages 3-40+ years. A single cask may be used for up to 70 years

Nice visual explanation.  Easy to follow with a focused message that isn’t crowded with a bunch of additional factoids.  

The text is a little too small to read without zooming in closer, and there should be a URL at the bottom linking back to the original infographic landing page.  Otherwise, how can people find the original version they can read when a blog doesn’t link back correctly?

Just in time for the weekend too, it’s making my thirsty…

Thanks to Justin for sending in the link!

The Infographic Kitchen Cheat Sheet

They’re not kidding when they say cheat sheet! The infographic Kitchen Cheat Sheet from Everest covers anything from kitchen conversions, to how to store your food, to how to cook different parts of animals! I’d recommend posting this infographic on your fridge!

Whether you are new to cooking or an experienced chef, everyone can use a little help in the kitchen sometimes. That’s why we created a comprehensive kitchen cheat sheet for you to fall back on whenever you are in doubt. We find it useful and we hope you do too!

Love the retro design style!  Although I wish they had visualized more of the data, this comprehensive guide covers almost everything you can find on the inside covers of every cookbook!  

The bottom of the infographic should have included a copyright (or Creative Commons) and the URL to the original infographic landing page for readers to be able to find the high-resolution version.

Everest has also provided three, smaller cheat sheets to easily print and post in your kitchen.  These are PDFs sized to A4 paper for the UK, but print fine on Letter parper in the U.S.

Thanks to Shelli for sending in the link!

How Banks Make Money From Home Loans

How Banks Make Money From Home Loans is explained right here in this infographic from Tomorrow Finance. We are even given the outstanding figure of $13.4 trillion of outstanding mortgage debt.

What the Frac?

How banks make money from home loans.

Fractional Reserve Banking refers to a banking system which requires the commercial banks to keep only a portion of the money deposited with them as reserves. The bank pays interest on all deposits made by its customers and uses the deposited money to make new loans.

This design does a good job of showing the audience the scale of the amount of money involved.  Each $100 stack of bills is carefully used to visualize the amount of money being used in the explanation, and it makes a bigger impact by making it visual.

The sources are carefully documented and all of the visualizations appear to match the numerical values.  At the bottom should be some type of copyright or Creative Commons statement, and the text URL back to the original infographic to help readers find the high-resolution version when they see posts of this on other sites.

The designer here did a really good job of telling a simple, focused story in the the infographic that is quick and easy for readers to understand.

Anatomy of a Television Commercial

Commercials, we don’t like them but we still have to watch them. (Except for superbowl commercials, those are funny!)  However, they are expensive to make and a lot of thought goes into them. The Anatomy of a Television Commercial by Voices.com explains what it takes to be a commercial worth it’s costs to make.

Learn about how to create a compelling TV ad in this visually appealing infographic. See key developments in the television ad industry and who the key players are. Learn how to write a script, what a good script length is and how to choose the right voice talent for a TV commercial.

This design does a good job leading the reader through a story top-to-bottom.  The use of the TV illustrations as frames for the different data visualizations consistently reinforces the television-related topic without text.

Where they messed up the visualizations is in the Television Commercial Durations section.  At first, I couldn’t understand why the visuals all looked wrong, but I finally realized they made a full circle equivalent to 100 seconds, instead of the standard 60 seconds used on EVERYONE’S clocks all over the world!  The 60-second visual should be a full circle, and not the 2/3 shaded circle shown.  Big visualization mistake!  Don’t confuse your audience.

I find it interesting that ad spending and television ad portion of advertising budgets continue to rise even with some many new ways to more effectively advertise online.  If there are any advertisers reading this post, may I point your attention to the Advertise page for Cool Infographics…

Thanks to Ashley for sending in the link!

12 Things To Do After You've Written A New Blog Post

The 12 Things To Do After You’ve Written A New Blog Post infographic from DivvyHQ is a self help guide that everyone who likes to post blogs could use. Also, it’s in a comically large printable design that I recommend! Instructions are below.

In early 2011, I was asked to guest blog for the Content Marketing Institute, which actually came from a consistent blog commenting strategy that I have executed for years. With their heavy focus on “how-to” content, I whipped up a post on the “12 Things You Need to Do After Writing a New Blog Post”. The checklist-style post was well received with thousands of retweets, likes and shares.

Now fast forward to March 2012. The infographic craze is in full swing, so I was perusing my content archives looking for something that I could turn into a good visual. I quickly recalled many CMI comments talking about how they had printed out the text-based checklist and had it pinned to their cube wall. BINGO! The rest is history…in the making.

Printing Instructions

1. Click the infographic above to open the PDF version.
2. Save it to your computer/hard drive.
3. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat or any PDF Reader application.
4. Hit Print.
5. In the PDF print setting dialog box, look for “Tile Scale” or “Print Scale” and set the percentage to 54%. Your print preview should now be showing that the infographic will print on three 8.5 x 11 sheets. If not, adjust the scale percentage until it fits.
6. Hit Print.
7. Tape the pages together.
8. Check your to-dos.
9. Hang it on your wall.
10. If you need help managing your blog or social media activities, you may want to try our 30-day free trial.

There’s no data shown in this design, it’s more of a process flow infographic.  Although it would have been nice in the infographic version of Brody’s process to show some of the stats behind why each of these activities is valuable to online marketing.

As a process infographic design, the content is very cool and the design matches.  It’s easy-to-read, icon illustrations support the content, minimal text descriptions and I love the added instructions to print it out across three pages to become a reference guide in the real world.

How to Properly Use Sunscreen

How-to topics are popular infographic designs, and How To Properly Use Sunscreen is a great topic to cover.  From STACK.com.  It’s over 100°F (over 37°C) here in Texas this week, so this is a very appropriate topic to share.

Most people know they should use sunscreen to protect themselves from the sun’s harmful rays. Unfortunately, few are fully aware of how to properly use sunscreen. This is particularly true of athletes who train and compete in the sun throughout the summer.

If you’re spending long hours in the heat this summer, sunscreen could become your most important piece of training equipment. Check out the graphic below to learn how to select the right SPF, understand application and find out how different conditions impact the need to use and reapply sunscreen. Don’t find yourself sunburned on the sideline this summer because you failed to educate yourself on how to properly use sunscreen.

As strong as the topic is, I see a number of design improvements that could be made:

• The stats need to be visualized!  The definition of SPF would have been a great data visualization comparing one hour in the sun without sunscreen to 15 hours in the sun with SPF 15.
• I love the varying degrees of transparency in the shadows behind the shield illustrations for the different levels of SPF
• Overall, there’s too much text.  More than a normal reader will take the time to read.

11 Steps To Voice-Over Success

Interested in trying to make money as an audio voice-over actor?  Thanks to 11 Steps to Voice-Over Success infographic from Voices.com, now you know how to get started!

Voice over actors give life to animation works, enlighten us through film narration and bring energy to radio commercials. The industry is estimated to be worth $12.3 billion worldwide, and is growing because of new digital mediums such as mobile radio, apps with audio podcasting. If you’re interested in voice acting, learn the 11 steps to voice-over success in this amazing infographic.

This design combines a process flow, some data visualizations, some illustrations and text descriptions in an easy to follow layout.  The large colored blocks for each step resemble following a board game path to make it simple for the reader to follow the process.

I think the design could have reduced the amount text much further.  I think there’s too much detail included to be quick to digest for the readers.  At the bottom there should have been the URL link to the original, full-size infographic (in addition to the Voices.com front page) and a copyright statement.

This design visualizes an 11-step process, and a good comparison would be the 10-step process design for How Affiliate Marketing Works I designed last year.  My approach was to give the reader the basics of the process, and then let them go to the website to get more details.  This design attempts to give the reader more complete information about each step of the process.  What do you think?

Thanks to Ashley for sending in the link!

See Mix Drink: Infographic Cocktails

The See Mix Drink Cocktail Guide is a fabulous infographic drink recipe book from Brian D. Murphy (@murph_e).  Currently available for about $10 on Amazon.com, it’s on my wish list.  Featured on GQ.com back in October when it was released, I have been totally remiss by not posting about it until now.  (My apologies Brian!)

Have you tried mixing a Mojito? What about a Rusty Nail? Or a Cosmopolitan? With See Mix Drink, the first-ever cocktail book to offer instruction through info-graphics, making the drinks you love at home is as easy as, well, See, Mix, Drink.

This unique, illustrated guide graphically demonstrates how to make 100 of today’s most popular cocktails. For each drink, color-coded ingredients are displayed in a line drawing of the appropriate glassware, alongside a pie chart that spells out the drink’s composition by volume for intuitive mixing. No other cocktail book is this easy or fun. Instantly understandable 1-2-3 steps show exactly how each drink is prepared, and anecdotes, pronunciation guides, and photographs of the finished drinks will turn newbie bartenders into instant mixologists. 

The GQ.com feature has the designs for ten of the recipes from the book.  They are all simple to understand, and easy to follow.

One thing I would suggest to improve the visualization design style is to combine the key and the ingredient portions.  No need to make the reader look to both sides of the glass illustration to figure out how much of each ingredient.  Just putting the name with the amount on the left side and getting rid of the color key would eliminate an eye motion for the readers.

Thanks to Brian for sending in the link (back in October!) and congratulations on the publication!

The Manual Photography Cheat Sheet

The Manual Photography Cheat Sheet by Miguel “Mig” Yatco is a very cool infographic for anyone who is ready to move off of Automatic Mode on their camera!  Yes, that means you!  Quit taking average photos with average settings!

No matter if you shoot with film or digital, understanding of these four aspects of photography are key to taking good shots.  I love how each one shows the reader the range of values, the impact of moving along the range to the pcitures and what the actual display looks like in the viewfinder on both Nikon and Canon cameras.

The only thing I would have liked to see was a visualization of the changes to depth of field.  How much range is in focus for each aperture setting?

Miguel has prints available on Zazzle.com.  You can buy a printed as a poster for $50, or as small as a 4”x6” card to carry around with you.  The standard size available is 23”x34.5”, but I wish the standard poster size was 24”x36” to fit in standard poster frames.

Great job Miguel!