Electrocardiography Basics

Electrocardiography Basics is a new infographic science illustration poster design by Eleanor Lutz at TabletopWhale.com for Nerdcore Medical. You can purchase the printed poster for $19.99 from Nerdcore Medical.

This week’s collaboration with Nerdcore Medical was a fun chance to try a more simple style than I usually use. For this poster I wanted to show 11 different kinds of heartbeat EKGs in a colorful design.

I wanted to highlight the unique shapes of each EKG wave as the focal point of the poster. After trying a few different things, I decided to try and make a digital heartbeat “sunrise,” where each of the EKG waves defined a specific colorful section of the poster. I thought it would show off the simple shape of the waves, and also work as a practical way to section off the different descriptions.

I ended up designing each line in Illustrator, and then importing the shapes to Photoshop to add textured shadows, color overlays, and text. More... 

Eleanor followed up this design with a behind-the-scenes blog Rough Drafts and Sketches post about what went into her design process, and specifically the color palette selection process (a beautiful infographic design itself!).

The Ultimate Hot Dog Style Guide

The Ultimate Hot Dog Style Guide from Food Republic is your go-to guide for all the popular styles of hot dogs!

It’s not just a sausage in a bun; it’s a beautiful blank canvas. It’s a hot dog, which is a foodstuff eaten worldwide. Here are 40 distinctive varieties from around the globe — from iconic NYC “dirty water dogs” to fully loaded South American street-cart dogs to Japanese octo-dogs. There is a tubesteak out there for every craving that ever was. 

The Coney dog remains my all-time favorite!

Thanks to Alton Brown for sharing on Facebook!

Sizing Up Sharks

The design team at National Geographic has published a beautiful size comparison infographic: Sizing Up Sharks, the Lords of the Sea. The parallax scrolling keeps you, the reference deep sea diver, in frame as a comparison to provide perspective for each of the various types of sharks.

Sharks range in size from largest fish on the planet to the length of your palm. See how you compare to some of these vulnerable predators that are so crucial to the ocean's health.

The tooth Illustrations are not in scale with the fish, but all the teeth are in scale to each other to show relative tooth sizes. For some reason, only a few of the smaller sharks species are shown with both the small end and high end of their size ranges.

This engaging infographic tells one story really, really well without adding too much other data that would have cluttered the design. The diver animation and underwater sounds are a nice touch.

Thanks to Chiqui Esteban (@chiquiesteban) for posting the link!

The massive Megalodon!

Anatomy of Songs

Anatomy of Songs and Anatomy of More Songs are hilarious looks at the common layout of songs from different genres. Designed by cartoonist John Atkinson, his site is called Wrong Hands. These stacked bar charts are geat visualization of timelines for songs.

John has designed many more along this same style like Anatomy of the Holidays, Anatomy of Generations and Anatomy of Ages

Found on Visually

Iconic Movie Glasses

Most of the fashion trends for eyewear come from characters in movies and at Yates and Suddell, eyewear is a big deal. The Iconic Movie Glasses infographic has 12 of the most memorable pieces of eye wear to hit the big screen all on one page! 

We’re all about eyewear here at Yates & Suddell. Whether a stylish pair of spectacles or a sharp set of shades, the right glasses can really complete your look. Just ask the costume designers to the stars, who have long relied on a pair of specs to lend their subjects a certain “je ne sais quoi”. These glasses often become iconic aspects of the movies in which they appear, and can end up influencing frame fashion for years to come.

Check out our new infographic to see 12 of the most iconic pairs of glasses to ever grace the silver screen. How many do you recognise?

Of course, most of these frames are now many years old, so you’ll be very lucky to track down a pair of originals. However, you’ll find that many of today’s frames are based on the same iconic shapes as the most popular of these glasses, making it easy to recreate the style of the star you love the most!

Fantastic topic idea for an online retailer of eyewear. The design is eye-catching, with minimal text and the illustrations are easily recognizable.

The footer should include the URL to the infographic landing page, so when people find this infographic on other sites, they can easily find the full-size original. 

Thanks to Matt for sending in the link!

Grandma's Apple Pie Infographic Recipe

Delicious and informative! The Grandma’s Apple Pie infographic from Task & Tool shares the recipe to delicious success when making apple pies as a visual, illustrated recipe!

This apple pie tastes delicious. It’s inspired by Grandma Ople’s Apple Pie. The 4.8 star rating from over 5000 reviews doesn’t lie - this recipe is fantastic. 

This is our first illustrated recipe. When I’m following recipes, I hate when I start cooking and then lose my place every time I need to find the next step on the recipe. The goal of this recipe design is to make it easier to find your place with helpful illustrations.

The other thing that bothered me is having to go from the recipe instructions to ingredients list to find the right quantity of each ingredient. Abigail designed these recipes with colored icons to help you go back and forth between the recipe design and the ingredient quantities easily.

Also, these recipes are designed to look pretty =)

Fun and delicious, a great combination! I love the use of the hand-drawn chalkboard look. It is a reminder of an old fashion teaching style with an old favorite, apple pie. Good use of color, and visuals (3D and 2D) with minimal words.

They have the TaskAndTool.com URL in the footer at the bottom, but it should include the URL to the actual infographic landing page on their site. Don’t make visitors search your site to find what they are looking for.

Thanks to Gavin for sending in the link!

Seven Myths of Email Marketing

The Seven Myths of Email Marketing infographic from Alchemy Worx addresses many of the misconceptions about email marketing head on.

Many beliefs that email marketers hold true regarding email are simply false, according to research and analysis conducted by my email marketing agency, Alchemy Worx. We analyzed data sourced from our work with customers and industry figures to arrive at our conclusions.

Here are seven such email myths, which are also presented in an infographic at the end of this article.

Great information with fun illustrations that attract viewers.  The statistics should be visualized though, instead of just shown in text.  Big fonts are not data visualizations, and don’t make the data any easier to understand for the readers.

Footer has good information with full links to the sources, a clear copyright and the company logo.  It’s only missing the URL link back to the infographic landing page so readers can find the orignal when people post it without a link back to the Alchemy Worx site.

Thanks to Christine for sending in the link!

Comic Tribute to Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)

Calvin & Hobbes is easily my all-time favorite comic, and Bill Watterson was able to beautifully offer thousands of life lessons through the 10 years of C&H comic strips.  Freelance cartoonist Gavin Aung Than has designed this fantastic Comic Tribute to Bill Watterson, and posted it on his site, Zen Pencils.

The quote used in the comic is taken from a graduation speech Watterson gave at his alma mater, Kenyon College, in 1990. Brain Pickings has a nice article about it. The comic is basically the story of my life, except I’m a stay-at-home-dad to two dogs. My ex-boss even asked me if I wanted to return to my old job.

My style is already influenced by Watterson, but this is the first time I’ve intentionally tried to mimic his work. It’s been fun poring through Calvin and Hobbes strips the past week while working on this comic and it was a humbling reminder that I still have a long way to go.

The quotes I’ve used in the write-up above are taken from the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection, which sits proudly on my desk.

So, why am I posting this on Cool Infographics?  I want to pose the question: Should we consider this to be an infographic?

There’s no numeric data.  No charts.  No data visualizations.  No call to action.

However, there is information.  The information source is Bill Watterson’s speech from 1990, and the illustrations do a great job of communicating the message visually.  The image layout follows the tall infographic style that is easy to share online.

My own opinion is that “Yes” this is an infographic.  What do you think?

Found on LifeHacker

  I miss Calvin & Hobbes…

Shutterstock: Annual Design Trends 2013 Edition

Shutterstock has created their Shutterstock: Annual Design Trends 2013 Edition infographic. From the infographic, we learn what was hot in 2012, as well as expected trend for the coming year of 2013. Interesting fact: Infographic downloads from Shutterstock are up 525% from 2011! 

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.

Thanks to Danny for sending in the link!

Defending the Death Star

Old age meets new age. Defending the Death Star with A little Data Center Design takes a concept that people can relate to (Star Wars) and applies modern day data center technologies. Brought to you by Data Center Reports.

When Aristotle first explained the concept of “hamartia” in Poetics, he probably didn’t know just how many hero and villain stories would be driven forward by fatal flaws in character, judgment or planning. The Star Wars saga is an epic tale that is powered by fatal flaws – yet we couldn’t help but wonder how things might have turned out had the Empire used a little of today’s security insights to better protect the superweapon better known as the Death Star.

This infographic design tells a good story with illustrations.  No big data sets to visualize, but a simple story that’s incredibly easy for the reader to understand.  The Star Wars comparison puts the different technologies into context for the reader.

The footer should include a copyright and the URL link to the original infographic so readers can easily find the original high-resolution version.

Found on Data Center Reports