Robin Richards - What Makes an Infographic Cool?

Guest Post by Robin Richards

Created a visual to show you instead of telling you.  Some thoughts on what makes an infographic cool along with some examples.

Robin Richards is a designer with a focus on visual storytelling and interaction design. He runs RIPETUNGI, a design studio based in Bristol, UK creating digital experiences for web, mobile and tablet and telling stories with data visualisation and infographics. 

LINKS:

ripetungi.com

Twitter: @ripetungi

LinkedIN: http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/robin-richards/2a/262/147

Karl Gude - What Makes an Infographic Cool?

Guest Post by Karl Gude

Infographics: Inform, Illuminate

What makes infographics cool is that they can be extremely effective at explaining every conceivable topic in any industry for any reason. What’s being defined as an infographic nowadays ranges from decorating simple text blocks to make the content more appealing to incredibly complex data visualizations that reveal content because there’s no other way to understand it. 

I started out doing infographics in journalism (we called them “news graphics”), and the beauty of having creating them in this field is that news knows no topical boundaries; it can be about anything. Besides making infographics on the obvious breaking news stories (like bombings and plane crashes), every conceivable topic was fodder for making an infographic to help readers understand what was going on. We made news graphics on political, business, entertainment and sports stories as well as on all sorts of technical, medical, and scientific advances. 

This experience led me to realize the value of employing these sorts of visual explainers in other industries outside of journalism, and this has helped me be a better teacher and adviser now that I’m in academia. For example, PR firms, businesses and other organizations need to better engage their audiences, scientists need to explain their research to each other as well as to the lay person (like funders) and federal agencies need to make sense of huge data sets. The list goes on. 

The good news is that resources for creating infographics are exploding! There are a multitude of new free online tools for designing, creating and packaging charts, maps and diagrams (I’ve stored a great many on my wiki freevisualtools.wikispaces.com, so help yourself!) and more are coming along every day. Also, many more freelance designers and firms are learning how to make them. It ain’t as easy to make them from scratch as you might think, so don’t entrust your administrative assistant to make one just because he knows Photoshop! Your brand identity and credibility are at stake here!

But designing an infographic only comes after you’ve decided who your audience is, what message you want to convey to them and what information is needed to tell that story. This is where most infographics get tripped up, by conveying the wrong story. Always keep the dictum, “Form follows function” in mind every time you begin an infographic. Otherwise, your beautifully designed graphic will be all hat and no head.

In a nutshell, infographics can often convey a message to a target audience more effectively than text alone can. Or not. Done poorly, infographics can confound more than illuminate, and to me the key task of an infographic is to make people feel smarter, not dumber. This is when infographics are definitely NOT cool. 

Karl Gude is the former Director of Information Graphics at Newsweek magazine and The Associated Press. Karl left Newsweek after a decade to spearhead the first information graphics program at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism. Karl also teaches a class on the creative process and on social media marketing.  

Karl is a visual storyteller, artist and writer who consults with corporations, scientific institutions and government agencies, including the NSF and the CIA, to help them create effective infographics. He also writes a regular column for the Huffington Post.

LINKS: 

Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-gude/

Blog: karlgude.com

Twitter: @karlgude

New Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/gudeye?ref=hl

Pinterest: https://pinterest.com/karlgude/

Youtube channel with tutorials: http://www.youtube.com/user/kgude/featured

John Pring - What Makes an Infographic Cool?

Guest Post by John Pring

For many, infographics are a relatively new phenomenon; we still get calls and enquiries from businesses and individuals who have ‘just discovered infographics’ and are looking to take advantage of the format. Similarly, many people who have seen the surge in popularity of a certain kind of data visualization consider infographics to be something of a ‘fad’ – an opinion usually formed by the combination of online proliferation of the term and the overuse of the format by SEO agencies as a link-building technique (just go to any SEO conference and you’ll be almost guaranteed to hear someone refer to infographics as a short-term trend that has already reached saturation point).

However, the truth is that infographics are by no means a new concept and they’re certainly not a fad that will disappear anytime soon (although I will concede that the general public will begin seeing a lot less of them once the SEO industry moves onto a new tactic for gaining inbound links to client sites).

Infographics and data visualizations have been around for thousands of years, even pre-dating the written language in the form of cave paintings from 30,000 BC, used to depict local resources and allow for visual records to be kept. Similarly, the Egyptians used hieroglyphs to tell stories about their culture, allowing future generations to learn a considerable amount about the Egyptian social structure and belief system. 

Example of a 30,000BC cave painting used as an inventory for crops

(By the way, just to address a common question there is a difference between data visualization and infographics, but clarifying the distinction here isn’t a major concern). 

Infographics have been around as long as we’ve been communicating with other human beings, and will continue to play an important role in our social and economic interactions for generations to come – which covers my first point in the consideration of infographics as a ‘cool’ format; they’ve been with us for as long as we’ve existed, facilitating communication and storytelling in a way that other formats (even written language) can often struggle to match.

But there are a couple of other reasons I love the infographic format, reasons that I think elevate them not just into the realm of being cool, but being one of the single most important communication tools at the disposal of the human race. 

SOCIAL IMPORTANCE & TRANSLATION OF COMPLEX DATA

Infographics boast a level of social importance that rivals any other form of visual media; in fact, it’s fair to say (without any hint of hyperbole) that infographics have saved lives.

In 1857 Florence Nightingale produced a series of infographics called ‘Coxcomb Charts’, charting the different causes of soldier deaths during the Crimean War. 

Nightingale was concerned around the number of deaths caused by poor hospital conditions, and decided to visualize the data in order to present a more compelling case to Queen Victoria. The Queen was shocked to see the data presented in such a clear an impactful way and these visualizations directly contributed to the improvement of hospital conditions, saving countless lives.

It’s worth noting here that Queen Victoria already had the statistics regarding solider deaths due to unsanitary conditions at her disposal, but it wasn’t until she saw the data visualized in such a dramatic fashion that she realized the true impact of hospital conditions compared to all other causes of solider mortality.

An excellent example of how infographics play a significant role in our everyday lives would contemporary road signs, particularly those in the United Kingdom. 

These signs were developed in 1957 by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir, combining information design and semiotics to produce simple, clear pictograms that can be easily understood (even while driving at speed). These signs were produced well over 50 years ago and are still in use today, demonstrating their effectiveness at portraying information through visual stimuli. 

In 2013, infographics are still playing an integral role in the social and political landscape – being used to both inform the general public of important information (for example the National Health Service in the UK used infographics to inform the general population of important changes to the way the health system worked) and to help inform decision makers at the top of the political spectrum. Data visualizations are regularly used to communicate complex statistical relationships to the government, helping them inform their decision-making and see patterns that would otherwise be extremely difficult to realize. 

One of the main ways infographics can achieve this is through the compression and translation of large amounts of complex data; an achievement that is only possible through visual representation. 

A fantastic example of this kind of data compression is the ‘Snake Oil’ interactive infographic produced by David McCandless and Andy Perkins in 2011: 

The infographic presents data from over 1500 placebo-controlled human trials to visualize the effectiveness of specific supplements on certain conditions. According to McCandless the data took 3 researchers months to gather and validate, yet this visualization takes all this data and compresses it into one easy to understand graphic. The ‘balloon race’ concept (i.e. the higher the bubble the greater the evidence for its effectiveness in treatments of specific conditions) allows the reader to bypass the months of data gathering and reading, yet gain the same level of understanding (in terms of the most important information) as someone who had undergone the research process.

EDUCATION

So we’ve looked at how infographics have pre-dated the written language, can save lives, portray important information in minimal time-frames, inform decision-makers, communicate important ideas to the general public and compress and translate huge, complex data sets. That should be more than enough to place infographics well and truly in the ‘cool’ column, but it doesn’t stop there; infographics are also one of the most effective educational tools we have at our disposal.

It’s now universally understood that the vast majority of us are visual learners, and there are numerous pieces of research that confirm the notion that information is easier to understand when displayed visually. This has obvious applications for education (whether it be primary school students or adult learners), but it’s not just comprehension that is improved by presenting information visually, as retention can also be improved dramatically.

Bandwidth of the Brain, courtesy of David McCandless and his TED talk 

The above visualization from David McCandless shows how we take in information in any given second – as you can see the vast majority of the information we take in from the outside world is absorbed via sight, making it our primary learning channel. This visual absorption means information displayed visually is far more likely to stick in our brains, making data retention and recall far more successful. 

So that’s it for my post on what makes infographics cool – and we didn’t even look at data organization (studies have shown that it’s easier to see patterns when data is displayed visually), the versatility of the infographic format (entertainment, link-building, education, business, sales tools, how-to guides, etc. etc.) abstract and schematic infographics (like Harry Beck’s London tube maps developed in 1933) or the fact that they’re hugely entertaining and far more engaging than traditional forms of communication and portraying data.

However, I will leave you with this. If none of the above convinces you that infographics are incredibly cool, then consider the plaque designed for the Pioneer space probe by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake: 

Even when it comes to trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, one of the most potentially significant designs in human history, it’s an infographic we turn to. 

John Pring is the director of inbound marketing and content creation at Designbysoap Ltd; a UK-based design and marketing agency specializing in content development and distribution.

Over the last few years John has overseen the production of thousands of bespoke infographics, data visualizations and interactive graphics for clients all over the world, including the European Commission, the BBC, AOL, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ford and numerous others.

LINKS

Designbysoap Ltd:  www.designbysoap.co.uk

Designbysoap Facebook Page

Twitter: @Designbysoap

Tiago Veloso - What Makes an Infographic Cool?

Guest post by Tiago Veloso

The ‘infographic explosion’ in the Internet began, as many of Cool Infographics readers probably know, around 2009. Since then, a whole new industry emerged, one that is dedicated to develop visual representations of information for organizations across pretty much all sectors.

It’s obvious that, as the number of marketing infographics grew, it became more difficult to achieve the link-bait impact we see so many agencies and SEO experts advertise, when defending the reasons why potential clients should include infographics in their marketing efforts.

Of course, a ‘viral infographic’ can have that impact, but the Internet user is getting more mature, I believe, in terms of what’s worth spending time reading. That means your infographic will have a couple of seconds to create an impression and captivate the reader – much like the ‘old’ newspapers headlines.

In fact, you can’t ask for a better reference of ‘what makes an infographic cool’ than the works published by many newspapers and magazines. And, from everything one can learn about infographics just by admiring some of best works in the world - like the ones awarded at Malofiej21, recently -, here are some of my favorite lessons:

Make it relevant to your audience, not to you

To be relevant, no matter in what context, implies to be correct. Nothing can be more destructive to an infographic than lack of accuracy. Dedicate enough time to research and instead of trying to mold the facts to an initial question or point of view, let the stories emerge from the data exploration process. Aim for that unique story everyone else missed. Concentrate on having a strong data-based story, in opposition of creating ‘lists of facts’.

Now, the problem with corporate clients is that usually you don’t have much data to work with in the first place. They just want an infographic, and if you’re an agency trying to make it in this market, you can’t afford to let any client escape, right?

However, poorly sourced and meaningless infographics tend to be less ‘viral’ – if they do go viral, it’s not usually good for the brand behind it. That just means it’s up to you to go after the sources – and I don’t mean just Wikipedia -, verify them, collect and explore the data, find the story before you even start drawing a chart or graphic.

The ‘8 hats of data visualization design’, by Andy Kirk, showing the multiple dimensions of developing a data visualization. 

Make it easy to the brain, not the eye

The ‘visual impact’ of an infographic it’s key in the Internet marketing business, a concept that has led to the premise that aesthetics means more to the general audience than the content itself. So, to create ‘awesome infographics’, graphic designers (most of them without any experience in visual journalism) run to vector illustrations, start playing with typography and colors, textures and even photos, adding elements that can fill up  the space of those widely adopted ‘tower’ formats that the client demanded.

This strategy helped the “Infographic Industry” to grow quickly, but like I said before, I think the information consumer is adapting, evolving, learning to process visual information more intuitively, and therefore, paying more attention to the content.

And what your brand really wants, ultimately, is a message that sticks to the brain, not only to the eye. Too many colors, fonts and vectors will only take away the reader’s attention from what really matters in an infographic: the layers of information, the multiple insights you’re not only saying (in text and numbers) but showing (with comparative graphics).

There are scientific principles applied to all dimensions of information design, and I must recommend Alberto Cairo’s book The Functional Art as the perfect starting point in that journey towards a deeper understanding of this topic. The important thing to have in mind is that if you focus on providing the best information display possible, and not the easiest or the most ‘eye-grabbing’ one, you’ll be heading in the right direction to get an infographic that will please both the eye and the brain.

‘Tower infographics’ can be useful, and even newspapers use them. See this recent example from Canada’s National Post, designed by Richard Johnson.

Make it as an investment in branding, not sales

This third point is sort of a consequence of the previous ones. To create a ‘Cool Infographic’ you’ll have to make an investment in research, find the right balance between form and function and still have the proper connections to see it featured in major websites. Most of times, you’ll need to outsource these tasks.

Worst of all, infographics don’t sell. They’re not supposed to. They can generate lots of website traffic, perhaps even some leads, but if you’re thinking about investing in Infographics to rise sales or something like that, than my advice is that you channel those resources on to something else (please remember that we’re talking about a specific type of ‘infographic’, not all the uses for information design inside a company).

If you add to that the general lack of tolerance the internet user has to ads disguised of something else, the only truly good reason for a company to create an infographic is that it has something meaningful to communicate, that is better (not ‘easily’) understood through this specific form of visual representation.

Or, simply putted, instead of looking at infographics as ‘illustrated ads/press-releases”, think of them more as “summarized insightful white papers”.

Simple graphics can be picked up by major websites, if the content is relevant. Here’s one of many examples of charts provided by Statista that ended up in Mashable. 

Tiago Veloso is the founder of Visual Loop, a collaborative digital environment for everything related to information design and data visualization. He lives in Brazil, and you can connect with him online on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Update on Tuesday, June 4, 2013 at 10:14AM by Randy

This post has now also been published on Portuguese on the Visual Loop Brazil site: http://visualoop.com/br/7072/infograficos-virais-comofaz

Alberto Cairo - What Makes an Infographic Cool?

GUEST POST by Alberto Cairo

A ‘cool’ infographic is one that not only forces you to stop and stare at it with awe, but also —and above all— one that gives you insights that you would not get otherwise. ‘Cool’ infographics reveal patterns and trends that lie buried below mountains of data and facts. They make complexity clear without compromising its integrity.

To be truly ‘cool’, an infographic needs to be honest, truthful, deep, and elegant. It can be fun, too, but it needs first to respect the intelligence of its potential readers, and be designed not just to entertain them, but to enlighten them. A bunch of out of context numbers or grossly simplistic charts surrounded by pictograms or illustrations is never a ‘cool’ infographic. Quite the opposite is true. The primary goal of ‘cool’ infographics is not to ‘bring eyeballs’ or ‘go viral’. Those are by-products. If you design with just those objectives in mind, you will end up having not an infographic, but perhaps a colorful but ultimately worthless poster. Any truly ‘cool’ infographic is a tool for rational understanding, an instrument to discuss relevant ideas and phenomena.

As an example, I would like you to visit this very simple but very smart interactive graphic by The Washington Post. See how carefully the information is layered and dosed in it. Notice how it first highlights some important facts (“Drug killings down”, “Most dangerous age…”) and then it lets you explore the data at will. It is beautiful, it is informative, it is useful. And it is extremely cool.

Alberto Cairo teaches infographics and visualization at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. He is the author of the book The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization (PeachPit Press, 2012). He has been a consultant and instructor with media organizations and educational institutions in more than twenty countries.

LINKS

www.thefunctionalart.com

Twitter: @albertocairo

School of Communication: http://com.miami.edu/ 

New Guest Post Series: What Makes an Infographic Cool?

What Makes an Infographic Cool?

I’m very excited about this project!  This week I’m going to start sharing a weekly guest post series from prominent infographics designers about “What makes an infographic design cool?”  Each Wednesday, I’ll feature a different expert opinion (until I run out of experts).  I’ve invited these experts to draft their own posts, and share whatever examples they want to highlight.

I’ve been running the Cool Infographics site since 2007, and we have watched an amazing category of design being developed.  They didn’t exist when I started, but now we have an infographics design industry, and a number of well known infographics design experts.  The practice of visual storytelling has become a recognized design profession.

I receive around 30-50 infographic submissions to the site every day, and most of them don’t make the cut to be considered a “cool infographic” to be posted.  The process of filtering these designs is very time consuming, and my current backlog is up to at least 400 unread submissions.  Over the years, we have developed our own formula for filtering the infographic designs you see posted on the site, but I really wanted to hear and learn from other experts about what they consider to be “cool.”

Stay tuned, and let me know what you think of the series in the comments.

Wealth Inequality in America

The Wealth Inequality in America infographic video was posted on YouTube back in November 2012.  The video is a good example of what the best infographic designs accomplish: Make the complex understandable.  

Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.

The data visualization in the video is very powerful and effective.  It takes the huge numbers that our brains have trouble processing, and visualizes them in a way that we can understand.  Comparing numbers puts them into context for the viewer, and comparing the different fifths of the population works very well in this instance.

The data sources are clearly listed at the end of the video, and they are even made available as clickable links in the video description on YouTube (which is very helpful).  This helps the credibility of the video tremendously.  Not many viewers (4,336,254 views as of the day I post this) will click to the links to view the source data, but they’re there.  Transparency creates credibility.

However, it’s not clear who created and is publishing the video, and this hurts the credibility a little bit, at least to a skeptic like me.  The video was uploaded by the user politizane, whose account was created just to upload this video.  No history of other videos, and no links to a company or website.  The author/designer obviously has an agenda, and spent a lot of time or money creating the video.  It would enhance the credibility even more if the viewer knew who was publishing and promoting the video.

Thanks to Doug for sending the link!

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!

SEO & Infographics - an Interview with Eric Enge

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

The Ultimate Complete Final Social Media Sizing Cheat Sheet

The Ultimate Complete Final Social Media Sizing Cheat Sheet by LunaMetrics is a huge (and very long) informational infographic that shows the readers all of the important image sizing requirements for the major social networks.

In June of this year, we published an infographic listing all of the sizing information for images on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. It was a wildly successful piece of content, totally blowing our expectations out of the water. Unfortunately, while its popularity has flourished, nearly every social network instituted changes to their image sizes, rendering most of the information on the infographic out of date.

We knew we needed to update the information on the cheat sheet, but we weren’t comfortable with simply adjusting one or two figures on the blog post and leaving it as-is. We’d also received a lot of feedback, both on the design and information it contained. We decided to redesign the entire sheet and incorporate a few more social networks.

We also decided to permanently redirect the old sheet here, so that shared tweets, pins, likes, and so on, would lead to the correct sizing dimensions. Additionally, as sizing changes are implemented across social networks, we’ll actively update this sheet – meaning that if you use the embed code at the bottom to share this sheet on your own site, the image will automatically update with changes as they are rolled out. No more out-of-date information.

I love that all of the sizes are shown in correctly proportional rectangles!  Based on their claim, this infographic should also update correctly as they revise it to match the ongiong changes from all of the social networks.  

Some color of the official logos of the different social media networks at each section break would have been helpful to the reader.  The light typeface used at each section break is hard to distinguish from the rest of the design.

Found on Social Media and Social Good