The Obama Energy Agenda: The White House attempts an #Infographic

On Friday, the White House (yes, that White House) released this infographic, The Obama Energy Agenda & Gas Prices.  This is one of the very few “official” infographic designs we’ve seen from the U.S. Government, so I think it deserves a little more critique than normal.  There are some things I like about this one, and some things I don’t.

The Good: 

• The fact that this was released by the White House, is a really big positive.  I generally praise companies that experiment with infographics to get their messages out, and an official one like this from the government says big things about infographics continuing to grow in relevance in today’s society of information overload.  If you want your information to reach a bunch of people online (especially the younger crowd) then using an infographic is your best bet.
• Nice layout telling a story.  The best infographics tell a story well, and the progression of topics top-to-bottom tell the story Obama’s team wants to share.  One topic leads into the next.
• Bold colors.  The dark background stands out nicely in most online news and blog formats, even on the white background color of the White House Blog.  The color gradient matches the new, official White House logo with the blue gradient background you see at the top.  Makes the overall infographic feel very official.
• Good use of illustrations.  Sometimes, visualizing a point is effectively done with an image or illustration so the reader immediately knows what you’re talking about.  The car with a power cord, the bus, the fuel gauge and the oil wells designed into the separator line near the top.
• I like the color scheme too.  Some infographics go so crazy with clashing colors it’s hard to read, but the consistent light blue, yellow and white is easy on the eyes.
• They included a social sharing button at the bottom of the blog posts.  They use a combined social button that expands to show many sharing services.  I generally find that less people actually use combined buttons, but they certainly save screen real estate and there’s a way to share online.  There’s no logo or company name included in this button either, so the White House isn’t endorsing a particular company.
• I like the line chart.  They removed the y-axis labels and put the data right onto the chart, along with additional comments.  This makes the whole chart easier to understand.

The Bad: 

• NO DATA SOURCES!  Where did the numbers come from?!?  You want readers to engage and debate your story, not challenge your facts.  Citing all of your data sources keeps the conversation on your story.  This design, without sources, almost invites readers to focus on challenging the facts instead of becoming engaged in the conversation about energy.
• Way too much text!
• The infographic above is the blog-size version.  The high-resolution version is tough to find because clicking on the image only takes you to the blog-size image.  Separately, in the text of the White House post, you have to click “Download Full Size” to view the higher-resolution version. (Click the image above to view high-resolution)
• Text too small.  The font is so small in some places, it’s hard to read, and many people won’t find the text link to the high-resolution version.
• Not many data visualizations.  Big numbers are not visualizations. and there are only three actual data visualizations (line chart, column chart and color filled factory illustrations).  There are so many more numbers included that should have been visualized to give them context!  
  • How does 35.5 mpg from 2012-2016 compare to the last four years?
  • “Over 2 billion barrels of American crude oil produced in 2010.”  Show the last 20 years to provide context.
  • “…would reduce oil consumption of about 750 million barrels through 2010.”  Is that a lot?  Making the text bold makes it feel important, but it doesn’t give the reader any frame of reference.
• The stacked column chart could be much better.
  • They could have removed the Y-axis labels and the background lines
  • Legends are evil.  In the 2012 column, they could have identified the color-coding of the different sources of renewable energy instead of putting a separate legend under the chart.  Makes the reader work harder to look back-and-forth at a legend.
  • Why isn’t “Solar” the yellow color instead of “Geothermal”?  Yellow…like the sun.
• The factory visual at the bottom is tough.  For any shape visualizations, it’s the AREA of the shape that conveys meaning, and I think the designer missed it here.  It looks like the green color height matches the data, but not the area of the factory shape.  Readers understand this intuitively, so to most readers the factory showing 2035 data will just look wrong, even if they don’t know why.
• No designer credit.  Who designed it?
• No single landing page.  The infographic is actually included in two different blog posts: The President on Jobs & Gas Prices: Read His Remarks, Download the Graphic on May 6th and Weekly Address: Clean Energy to Out-Innovate the Rest of the World on May 7th.
  • This makes tracking more difficult because they would have to look at links and views for both individual blog posts.
  • The infographic is actually the secondary topic to both blog posts, so it’s never truly highlighted as the focus of the blog post.  It’s just included in blog posts about energy topics.

Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE that the White House staff is experimenting with infographics, and I hope they do many more in the future.  They just need some more practice. 

What do you think?

Regular vs. Royal Wedding Costs

Adaptu brings us the Regular vs. Royal: The Cost of Getting Married infographic.

Roses or tulips? Open bar or cash bar? New gown or alter the one you found online? Do you have room to invite former Prime Minister Tony Blair? The only task more stressful than planning a wedding is financing it, and nothing tops a Royal ceremony.

Keeping the cost in perspective, we wanted to compare the average American wedding budget to the Royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Click on the infographic to learn what the typical couple spends on flowers and ponder what botanical masterpiece cost the Royals $800k.

I was inundated with submissions of royal wedding infographics, and sadly only a few of them were good.  I like the fresh design aspect of this one designed by the team at Periscopic.com (I just added them to the Cool Links page).  The increasing size of the trapezoids stacked into a triangle is interesting.  What I can’t tell by observation is if they did the area calculations correctly.

In a visual comparison of shape sizes used to compare numbers in a data visualization, the area of the shapes is what the reader sees as indicative of the value, and in this infographic, but the width and height of each trapezoid is adjusted to maintain the traingle shape and be true to the values represented.

I applaud the effort to try new shapes and experiment with a fresh way to visualize the comparison between values.

Thanks to Dino for sending in the link!

Real Estate Professionals & Social Media Infographic

From Mashable and Postling, the Real Estate Industry + Social Media Use infographic looks at how social media is reshaping how realestate agents communicate with potential buyers.

The real estate industry has seen a number of social media innovations over the past few years. Real estate pros are using social media to provide online property tours, schedule showings and showcase local expertise.

Alexis Lamster, VP of customers at Postling and creator of the infographic below, told us that the company analyzed more than 500 Postling accounts specific to real estate and more than 7,000 small business accounts to extract information on how the real estate industry is using social media.

Although the infographic is made up of mostly pie charts and bar charts, it clearly communicates the information in a clean, easy-to-read format.

Eat, Drink and Be Thrifty: #infographic video

New infographic video from Mint.com,  Eat, Drink and Be Thrify uses their data to visualize the statistics behind monthly spending habits.

So how does your spending on food and dining compare to that of your peers? Using aggregate and anonymized data on Food & Dining spending from Mint.com, we created the video above to highlight some of the most interesting trends we found in Mint’s data, from average transaction at a variety of coffee shops, grocery stores and fast food restaurants, to the time of year when Mint users spend the most — or the least — in those categories.

Designed by Column Five Media and Akorn Entertainment.

BT Financial Infographic Commercials

BT Financial Australia created a series of video commercials called The Bigger Picture using florescent light tubes to animate growth charts in the infographic ads.

I’m very impressed that the design group BT used, The Glue Society, went out looking for a visual way to convey the data that was interesting, but also created a unique look for BT.

They also published a cool Making-Of video looking behind the scenes at setting up the physical light structures and filming the ad spots.

Found on Information Aesthetics and Fast Company.

Hans Rosling: Visualizing Mortality History [video infographics]

Hans Rosling, known for some of his famous TED Talks, here tries a little augmented reality with his animated charts showing life expectancy and wealth all over the world for the last 200 years.  120,000 data visualized in this 4 minute video clip from his The Joy of Stats documentary for the BBC.

Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

Thanks Udi for sending in the link!

Client Infographic: The 2011 SAP Salary Survey

The 2011 SAP Salary Survey is a new (tall) infographic InfoNewt (my company) designed for Panaya, a software-as-a-service company that provides upgrade automation to SAP customers.  The team at Panaya runs this survey annually to gather information about SAP professionals, and shares it publicly as a source of valuable information to current and future clients.

In 2011, the number of participants more than doubled to over 800. So, while as an online survey it should be taken with a grain of salt, we believe it is more representative of current realities. We tried to focus on issues that are of interest to the global SAP community versus regional issues.

For example:

• Are Europeans earning more than Americans? (Hint: No)
• Is there gender bias among SAP professionals?
• Is there a correlation between education and pay level?
• What are the top paying jobs?
• What is the outlook for 2011?

You can read the detailed report here.

The infographic is only a top-level summary of the detailed report, and gives Panaya a great way to build awareness and share the survey results broadly with the online community.

Thanks to Udi and the rest of the team at Panaya!  There’s much more information available at Panayainc.com and ERP Executive: The Magazine for SAP Managers.

Small Business: By The Numbers

Intuit brings us By The Numbers: Small Business in the U.S. and Abroad.  I like the mix of 2D and 3D visuals, but the visuals at the bottom seem odd.  Showing different statistics for a handful of countries instead of comparing the same statistics across countries makes that part harder to understand.  I would guess that was dependent on what data was available for the different countries.

Inflation and currency exchange play large factors in the cost to start-up a new business abroad compared with the United States. If you’re considering starting up a small business, the below infographic breaks down start-up costs, ease of business and success rates broken down by country, as well as a view of small business around the globe.

I appreciate that they cite their sources, but I wish I could give credit to the designer, who isn’t listed on the infographic.

As a small business owner myself, I hope I fall on the good side of the survival statistics!

Thanks for sendng the link Rachael!

2010 Box Office Movies Infographic

As the year ends, the 2010 Box Office Movie Chart is complete.  A cool, interactive view of the box office receipts by week.  It’s pretty large, so you have do some scrolling through they year.  If you hover over any movie in the chart, it displays the actual receipt dollars for that week so you can see the numbers behind the chart.

Zach Beane has created a number steam graphs showing movie box office receipts for the last five years and more.

I had an idea for displaying box office data graphically and here are the results. It’s inspired by stream graphs and the works of Edward Tufte.

Each page displays trends in the top 25 movies at the box office for each weekend in a year. The color is based on the movie’s debut week. Because of that, long-running movies will gradually start to stand out from newer movies with different colors.

Nice work Zach!

Found on VizWorld

Halloween Home Improvements [infographic]

Click to enlarge

Halloween Home Improvements gives you 18 inexpensive ideas to improve your outside house decorations for Halloween, and make your house the most memorable in your neighborhood.

Looking to scary up your home? Well, here are some ideas for Halloween home improvements that will make your house a boo-tiful abode (see what I did there with boo-tiful? That kind of instinct for wordplay can’t be taught …).

From BuildDirect.com.