Big Data & Infographics eBook Bundle

Humble Bundle and Wiley Tech have teamed up to offer the Big Data & Infographics Book Bundle! This is a limited-time offer, and EXPIRES on Monday December 3rd, 2018 at 2pm EDT! I love that this deal is supporting Doctors Without Borders!

HUMBLE BOOK BUNDLE: BIG DATA & INFOGRAPHICS BY WILEY

We've teamed up with Wiley for our newest bundle! Get titles like 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization, Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design, and The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions. Plus, your purchase will support Doctors Without Borders!

My book, Cool Infographics, is part of the deal, but I'm not getting a portion of the bundles. No affiliate link, no sponsorship fee, no kickbacks. I didn't even know about the deal until I noticed other people talking about it on Twitter! I'm just excited for my book to be included in the bundle for promotion!

(I did notice they used the dataviz design from my book cover for their promotional graphics)

It is a fantastic collection of books, and you should grab it while it's available! I have most of these on my shelf!

Giveaway: 5W Information Graphics & Data Visualization Workshop Dallas

This month (August 2018) I'm giving away ONE FREE ticket to attend the 5W Information Graphics and Data Visualization 2-day workshop in Dallas, TX on September 13-14, 2018.

Register on the Giveaways Page by August 31, 2018 to be entered, and the winner will be chosen on September 1st!

Juan and Samuel Velasco currently have workshops scheduled in four cities across the U.S., so I'm jumping on the chance to attend and help promote the workshop in Dallas. I highly recommend you check out the schedule and attend one if they are close to you.

Cool Infographics Book Giveaway December 2017

During December 2017, I am giving away one signed copy of my book Cool Infographics! 

Register on the Giveaways Page by December 15, 2017 to be entered.

I posted this on the Giveaways page in November but forgot to mention it here, so I'm extending the registration deadline until December 15th.

You can always download a free chapter from the Book page to get a sample from the 1st chapter, The Science of Infographics.

A cool infographic tells a story visually —an engaging story built with your data. More than just using pictures or colorful charts, infographics create the type of visual information that your audience will quickly grasp and remember.  Inside, the fundamentals of infographics are clearly explained for both novices and experienced professionals.

Cool Infographics Book in Chinese!

I was finally able to get my own printed copy of the Chinese translated version of the Cool Infographics book! According to my publisher, Wiley, it has been translated into Simplified Chinese, and Orthodox Chinese, Korean and Russian versions are still in the works. The Chinese version is available in the US through Amazon.

Of course, the only way I can tell what the Chinese translation says is to translate it back into English with the Google Translate app. They translated the title "Cool Infographics" into 可视化沟通, which translates back to English as "Visual Communication". I know the app isn't perfect, but you can get the general meaning.

Just under 5% of the Cool Infographics web traffic comes from China, so I know there are a lot of fans there.

I had to work with the Wiley editors to get the chapter colors to show up along the page edges. My thoughts were that it's a visual communication book, and you should be able to find the chapters visually! The translated version got that right too:

 

Talking Infographics on The PolicyViz Podcast

This week, I was the guest on The PolicyViz Podcast hosted by Jon Schwabish! It was a great conversation about infographics, storytelling in charts, my design pet peeves, dataviz tools, my infographic design process and the past, present and future of infographics!

BONUS: Listen to the episode for directions to enter in the drawing for a signed copy of the Cool Infographics book!

Mapping the Disciplines of User Experience Design

Mapping the Disciplines of User Experience Design is an uber-complex Venn Diagram. The original concept by Dan Saffer at KickerStudio was given a clean DataViz overhaul by Thomas Gläser who was with envis precisely at the time.

An infographic approach to visualize all players of the interactive field

. It shows the different areas and how they connect and overlap.

The diagram is based on the work of Dan Saffer

It's a couple years old, but all of the files were published on Github under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-ShareAlike so anyone can Adpapt or Improve the design going froward.

You can see the original concept from Dan Shaffer here:

Found on FastCoDesign

Using Visuals to Enhance Your Credibility

Infographics and visuals have become the lifeblood of storytellers, be it marketers, professors, presenters, etc. They are constantly battling short attention spans, information overload, and little vested interest from their audience. The smart marketer knows their target, and comes with a battle plan to defend against all of these things. This is where visuals come in.

Reasons to Use Visuals

We’ve relied on visuals for everything from street signs and movie banners to websites and presentations. Using visuals to express information has long been a part of our history. Here are just a few more reasons to use them in your presentations and marketing efforts:

1.     Getting Attention

A visual makes information stand out more than just text alone. Studies estimate that between 50-80% of the human brain is dedicated to forms of visual processing.

On social media, they simply take up more real estate than their text only counterparts. A post with some type of visual content has 94% more total views on average than content without images, according to MDG advertising.

2.     Simplicity

As humans, we’re simply wired to receive rich visual information, and can understand more complex information when it is presented visually. Infographics are a great way to provide your audience with context when displaying statistics that are otherwise meaningless.

3.     Credibility

Credibility is one of the biggest reasons to use visuals. Put a statistic in an article and it is questioned. Put a statistic in a visual and it is fact.

In fact, every form of visual information lends credibility to what is presented. 46.1% of people say a website’s design is the number one way to determine the credibility of a company, according to the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.

This works the same way in presentations. In 1986, a 3M-sponsored study at the University of Minnesota School of Management found that presenters who use visual aids are 43% more effective in persuading audience members to take a desired course of action.

Use This Power Responsibly

In light of this information, it is important to use this responsibly. Providing accurate information is the most important thing content marketers and visual storytellers will do. No matter how beautifully crafted your infographic or visual is, it can be destroyed by one misrepresented fact, or out-of-context statistic.

Update on Thursday, March 31, 2016 at 3:33PM by Randy

This post also appeared on The Huffington Post

Designing Infographics That Last

The web is inundated with new content on an hourly basis. So much so that it can be hard for any content to stand out. Readers have an attention span shorter than a goldfish! With trending hashtags, sponsored posts and the brevity of posting with fewer than 140 characters, hot trending topics often play a factor in the success of your infographics. But it doesn’t have to. 

While we’re busy flitting from one project to the next, always looking ahead, it’s possible to lose track of our content once it has passed the design phase. But the long-term success of your content relies on more than just good design. I define the Online Lifespan of your infographic as the amount of time it remains relevant to the audience, and it plays a huge role in the measurable success of your content. 

First, you need to determine your project’s goals. What is your goal for this infographic? Are you looking for a short-term boost in traffic? Or are you looking to post content that readers will view and share for years to come? 

Sometimes your infographic works with an online lifespan somewhere in between. For example, the annual “Death & Taxes” poster visualizes the Federal Budget and has a lifespan of a year before its information becomes outdated when a new budget is released.

SOURCE: Timeplots

If you’re looking for longevity, however, choosing a lasting topic for your content can work to your advantage. Here are just a few of the benefits:

• More bang for your buck: It essentially costs you the same amount of time and resources to design an infographic with a short online lifespan as it would for a design with a long lifespan. You spend the same amount of time and effort in your design and research, but gain two very different results.
• Visibility: No one will be searching for the Top 10 Christmas Traditions in 2015 after December 25, 2015, so all of your traffic needs to happen within a short period of time. A longer-lasting way to frame this infographic would be to create a timeline of Christmas traditions over the last few hundred years. Although this isn’t typically “evergreen” content, you’ll see a resurgence of traffic every year around Christmas time. Without a hard end-date, your infographics can live on driving views, backlinks and social shares for years to come.

SOURCE: Balsam Hill

• Less maintenance: Once you’ve created a piece of evergreen content, there’s little to no maintenance necessary to keep your content relevant.

While there are situations where trendy and timely content can work in your favor, creating content with a longer online lifespan can lead to longer lasting success. It all comes down to the topic choice and the type of data.

Selecting your topic is the most important factor in determining the online lifespan of your infographic. Jumping on a breaking news topic is a great way to get your client some quick visibility, but does little to increase its long-term exposure. However, coming up with truly evergreen content like the infographic below will keep your content relevant long after you’ve created it. 

SOURCE: Wine Folly

Keep these goals in mind when selecting a topic for your next infographic. A blend of trending topics and evergreen content can build a very robust content strategy.

Update on Thursday, March 31, 2016 at 3:33PM by Randy

This post also appeared on The Huffington Post

DataViz & Infographics Fall Course at SMU CAPE

Infographics & Data Visualization Design

September 24-November 12, 2015 | 6pm-9pm Thursday Evenings | SMU CAPE Plano Campus | $595

$75 off discount code for Cool Infographics readers: RK215

This Fall, I will again be teaching a course as part of the CAPE program (Continuing and Professional Education). This time the course will be at a new location at the SMU Plano Campus. This is a very hands-on course where participants will start to develop better charts, infographics and your own infographic resume. Topics include:

• The art and science of data visualization and infographics
• The data visualization and infographics design process
• Data analytics and basic statistics for the designer
• Different chart types, dashboards and graphing options
• How to use the various software and online tools readily available and when to use them
• Strategies for publishing and promoting infographics online
• Understanding IP, trademark and copyright issues and how they relate to infographics
• And more...

Please share with anyone in the Dallas area, or join the class yourself. Enrollment is very limited, so register quickly!

Click Here to learn more: bit.ly/SMU-DataViz-Plano

Also check out the DFW Data Visualization & Infographics Meetup group with monthly speakers and events in the Dallas-Fort Worth area!

Visual Storytelling: The Big Trend for SXSW 2016

It’s only August, but voting is already underway for the March 2016 South By Southwest (SxSW) Interactive conference. Long thought of as the breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies, we can gleam industry insights from the SXSW Interactive Festival. This year, I decided not to wait until the conference to delve into the veritable buffet of groundbreaking panels vying for festival space. This year’s PanelPicker interface received more than 4,000 proposals, which is an all-time record!

While a quick search of infographics yields only 11 results, a mere TWO actually have the word “Infographics” in the title. The industry discourse has shifted away from “how-to” models to “how to do it right.” Infographics have become a key format of the larger conversation: Visual Storytelling.

A quick search for “Visual Storytelling” yields over 200 talks in PanelPicker, along with hundreds more for “data visualization” and “visual content”.  Infographics are now used as one of many effective tools in the Marketer’s toolbox, and an accepted part of the larger conversation happening in the content marketing industry.

Visual storytelling is vital to content marketing success. The following types of visual content are at the forefront of the proposals for next year’s SXSW Interactive Festival.

1.    Animated GIFs

Source: Animagraffs by Jacob O'Neal

The social media world has been slow to adopt GIFs, with Facebook only just embracing the truncated clips this year. The average human attention span in 2015 is 8.25 seconds, so these bite-sized animations are the perfect for telling a complete story in a short amount of time. The motion in the image also captures attention on an already crowded news feed.

Check out these GIF-centric presentations, “Why GIFs are turning into the New Emojis on Mobile” and “Visual Storytelling - GIFs, Graphs, and Napoleon.”

2.    Visual Presentations

Slideshare and other presentation-style platforms provide a visual and interactive way to share lots of information. With millions of visitors per month, Slideshare is an easy way to have your presentations seen by a large audience.

Perfect your visual presentations with “Sucking Less When Presenting Creative” and “The Power of Poise: Chi for Pitch and Presentation.”     

The Science of Happy Design - SXSW 2015 from Pamela Pavliscak

3.     Real-time storytelling

Real-time storytelling has increased in popularity with the rise of live feed social platforms like Periscope and Meerkat. The ease of execution and the sheer scope of the audience made these two platforms instantly successful. While Meerkat took the prize for most buzzed app at last year’s SXSW, Periscope has the weight of Twitter behind it and has become the more successful of the two.

Use these two tools to live broadcast your events, host a Q&A, or even share professional tips to a larger audience. Perfect your live-streaming with the “Live Streaming Killed Cable TV Star” and “Igniting Creativity with Periscope” PanelPicker proposals.

Source: AdWeek

4.    Infographics

I couldn’t get through my list without mentioning infographics. Still one of the best ways to convey complex information in a shareable and visually appealing format, infographics should be worked into your content marketing strategy. While they are no longer the only way to tell a visual story, they remain a marketing industry staple.

Round out your visual storytelling prowess with great infographics. Learn how to rock your next infographic with my own proposal, “7 Deadly Sins of Infographics Design and How to Fix Them.”

Source: Visme 

Buzzword or not, visual storytelling is something we’ve all been doing since we first snapped a picture with a polaroid camera, we’re just getting better at it. Judging by PanelPicker entries alone, the 2016 SXSW Interactive Festival will be another great year for the content marketing industry.

Update on Thursday, August 27, 2015 at 7:47AM by Randy

This post also appeared on The Huffington Post