The Dark Web

We have heard of the dark web. But what is actually sold on it? The Dark Web infographic from Weforum.org reports the revenue totals from 3 categories; illegal drugs, prescription drugs, and non-drugs.

We often hear about the dark web being linked to terrorist plots, drug deals, knife sales and child pornography, but beyond this it can be hard to fully understand how the dark web works and what it looks like.

Just like the forest, the dark web hides things well – it hides actions and it hides identities. The dark web also prevents people from knowing who you are, what you are doing and where you are doing it. It is not surprising, then, that the dark web is often used for illegal activity and that it is hard to police.

Off the paths it is almost impossible to find anything – unless you know what you’re looking for – so it feels a bit like a treasure hunt. Because really the only way to find anything in this vast forest is to be told where to look. This is how the dark web works – and it is essentially the name given to all the hidden places on the internet.

So just for a minute imagine that the whole internet is a forest – a vast expanse of luscious green as far as the eye can see. And in the forest are well worn paths – to get from A to B. Think of these paths as popular search engines – like Google – allowing you as the user the option to essentially see the wood from the trees and be connected. But away from these paths – and away from Google – the trees of the forest mask your vision.

Good use of proportional circle sizes to represent the dollar values!

Found on Weforum.org

The Top Colors of the Internet

Paul Hebert has done the research and visualized the Colors Used by the Ten Most Popular Sites on the Internet. You can see the fan chart above with changing background color that reveals some of the hidden colors.

The Internet is primarily blue!

Paul Hebert:

I was curious what colors were being used by large, popular sites, so I decided to find out.

By displaying the colors used in popular sites in a variety of ways we can glean interesting conclusions about modern trends in web design. Organizing the colors by hue, saturation and value provides viewers with a variety of different ways to view the data. Instead of forcing conclusions upon the user this visualization provides them with the information they need to draw their own insights. I scraped the data using PHP, then built the page using PHP, HTML, SCSS, and Javascript.

This data is current as of September 18th, 2016.

Although I've tried to make this site as accurate as possible there are some known issues which have not yet been resolved.

1. Colors in images are not included.
2. Some colors in stylesheets aren't actually used on the sites.
3. Colors added by external javascript are not included.

All of the visualizations on the original site are interactive with pop-up information on the actual color, but you can see a few of the other static visualizations here.

Found on this great write-up by Wired

Pay Per Click Checklist

When you have an AdWords PPC campaign, it is not a set-and-forget system. To get the most from your system, you should follow an on-going, structured plan like the Pay Per Click Checklist infographic. Midas Media has designed this simple infographic to maximize your PPC results.

When you hear people talk about Pay per Click (PPC) Management they typically mean Google AdWords.

That said, PPC now spans a whole spectrum of platforms from social media, content, display and of course ‘the daddy’ Google search itself.

This actionable PPC optimisation checklist is directly attributed to managing an AdWords PPC campaign, but it’s fair to say it can be applied to other paid search marketing too. It can also be used as the basis for a campaign review and audit check list.

This is published on the landing page as a good combination of longer article with more in-depth detail, and a simple infographic that is easy to understand and share.

Thanks to Ed Leake for sending in the link through Twitter.

Responsive Web Design

When you have your own website, there are plenty of decisions you have to make. The Responsive Web Design infographic from Verve gives helpful information about why you need to to seriously consider upgrading to a responsive design for your web page.

Is your website optimised effectively for all devices and platforms? Don’t just think mobile or desktop, think every simgle device and user on the web. Responsive websites are designed to provide an optimal viewing experience across all platforms

Nice visuals and illustrations that explain how responsive websites work.

Thanks to Dave for sending in the link!

5 Great Online Tools for Creating Infographics

Professional infographic designers rely primarily on a core vector graphics software program to create their infographics designs. The main advantage is that all the icons, charts, images, illustrations, and data visualizations are treated as separate objects that can be easily moved, resized, overlapped, and rotated. No matter where you create the individual design elements, the final infographic design is usually put together in a vector graphics program.

Creating infographics using online tools has never been easier. In the last few years a number of online tools have emerged that allow anyone to create great visual content.  Whether you are working on a project for work, personal use, or social media, each new project starts with a template. With the dimensions laid out for you, you can focus your attention on quickly creating effective designs. Search, drag, and publish - it can be that simple.

These new tools are vector graphics applications that run in your browser as a replacement for using an expensive professional desktop application like Adobe Illustrator to put your infographic design together.  Each one offers different tools, image libraries, charts, fonts and templates as a starting point.  None of these have the full capabilities of a professional desktop application, but you probably don’t need that much power to create a simple infographic.

In this article, we take a quick look at 5 of the best online tools for creating infographics: Visme, Canva, Easel.ly, Piktochart, and Infogr.am. All of these tools are evolving quickly, and this is just a snapshot of their current capabilities.

1) Visme (visme.co)

Visme allows you to create interactive presentations, infographics and other engaging content. With tons of templates, and huge library of free shapes & icons to choose from, Visme has you creating awesome visual content right away.

The templates are set up simply and beautifully. If you wanted, you could just edit the placeholder text, insert your own, and publish your infographic.

One of the greatest aspects of this service is changing percentages within the charts. All you have to do is click on the graphic you would like to change, enter a new number, and the chart changes to reflect the new information automatically. Saving you hours of frustration trying to do it on your own.

Pros:

• Creates infographics, presentation, animations, ad banners, and custom layouts.

• Insert and edit chart objects directly by changing the data values.

• Large library of icons and images.

• Embed YouTube videos directly into designs.

• Special pricing for students & teachers.

Cons:

• The basic free version is limited.

  • Only 3 projects.

  • Must include the Visme logo.

  • Limited access to charts and infograph widgets.

• JPG download is still in Beta, with a few bugs.

Price: Basic version is free with pricing plans available

2) Canva (canva.com)

Canva just celebrated their 1-year anniversary last month, and has made a big splash in the online design space.  Your experience kicks off with a great "23 Second Guide to Beautiful Design," where they walk you through a brief introduction to their design program.

After finishing the brief tutorial, you can start a new design. Canva is filled with options, whether you are working on a project for work, personal, or social media. Each new project comes with a template for the project you choose to work on. With the dimensions done for you, you can focus your attention on creating beautiful designs in seconds.

Pros

• Excellent (and short) intro tutorial to get you started, and many more on advanced concepts.

• Templates for social media, blogs, presentations, posters, business cards, invitations, and more.

• Easy and intuitive to use.

• Large library of images to choose from.

Cons

• No editable chart objects. You need to import your own data visualizations as images.

• Have to pay for different image assets individually, instead of a monthly subscription.

Price: Free, but you have to pay for Pro quality design assets individually

3) Easel.ly (www.easel.ly)

Easel.ly is a great program, but lacks some of the guidance, and features, that come standard in other programs.

Easel.ly lacks a "How-To" introduction section to their program, and just kind of throws you into the design process right away. Their focus seems to be primarily based on infographic design. Whereas other programs offer a plethora of design project options.

If you're just looking to design an infographic, this program will work well. If you want more variety, you'll have to utilize one of the other programs in this list.

Pros:

• Free.

• Very basic design layouts and assets.

• New charts feature allows some basic editable charts in your design.

• Easy downloads for JPG and PDF versions.

Cons:

• Not a very large selection of themes, called “Vhemes”.

• Small library of image assets. You’ll want to upload your own images and icons.

Price: Free

4) Piktochart (piktochart.com)

Piktochart is one of the best looking programs on this list. All the information you need to get started is provided in their tour.

Their program is easy to use, and offers tons of freedom in building and editing your infographic using their simple graphic tools. They have categorized icons, resizable canvas, design-driven charts, and interactive maps to utilize.  

Their intuitive user interface is where Piktochart truly excels. All the tools you need to create are laid out intelligently, making your new job as a "designer" so much easier.

One of the coolest aspects of this program is that they show how versatile infographics are for different projects. Whether you're creating for a classroom, office, website, or social media setting - Piktochart gives you the heads up on how to use infographics effectively.

Pros:

• Themes and templates are of high design quality.

• Intuitive. Allows you to edit anything and everything with ease.

• Create infographics, reports, banners and presentations.

• Embed videos from Youtube and Vimeo in your design.

Cons:

• Limited selection of free templates. Higher quality templates are available with a Pro account.

• $29 per month is a high subscription price compared to the others.

Price: Start for free with pricing packages available

5) Infogr.am (infogr.am)

Infogr.am has got the best charts. For illustrating data, there are more than 30 different types of charts to choose from. Anything from bubble charts and tree maps to simple pie charts.

Editing data can be easily done in Infogr.am's built-in spreadsheet, or you can import your own XLS, XLXS and CSV files.  Once your infographic has been edited and beautifully designed, you can save it to your computer as a PNG or PDF file with a paid subscription.

Pros:

• Ability to create and edit great charts by changing data

• Built-in Spreadsheet. Can also import your XLS, XLXS and CSV files

• Widest variety of available chart types

• Educational and Non-profit pricing plans available

• Embed videos from Youtube and Vimeo in your design.

Cons:

• Only creates infographics and charts

• Small selection of infographic templates

• No image library, you must upload your own image assets

• Download options require paid subscription

• The White Label subscription service is the most expensive options of the group

Price: Basic version is free with pricing plans available

Which design sites have you tried? Which tools are your favorites? Post in the comments.

Secrets of a Killer Blog Post: Images

It can be hard to run a successful blog. Here at Cool Infographics, we strongly believe in graphics and images (big surprise right?). But if you still need a little persuading, the Secrets of a Killer Blog Post: Images infographic can tell you more great things about images and what they can do for your blog.

You already know that well-researched, high-quality content is the backbone of a killer blog post. But don’t underestimate the importance of a strong visual component when you’re composing your latest and greatest update for your audience

The human brain processes images in as little as 13 milliseconds—less than the blink of an eye.

A post with an image is far more enticing to the bounce-happy readers of the Internet than one without, and is more likely to be shared on social media as well.

There’s a lot of information in this one!  Everything this design mentions about photos and images applies to posting infographics as well.

Published by whoishostingthis.com

HelpMeViz: DataViz Community Feedback for Your Charts

Have you ever struggled with which type of chart to use in your presentation? Or how to get Excel to display the chart the way you want it to appear?  Or don’t know what software will create the data visualization you would like to use?

Jon Schwabish is a data visualization specialist, and in 2013 he launched a new website to help everyone become better at data visualization called HelpMeViz.  The HelpMeViz site invites you to submit your data visualization projects to get feedback from the community.  The community is encouraged to offer suggestions, critiques and debate ideas about chart formats, software tricks, visual applications and visualization methods that can be valuable feedback to make your data more understandable and impactful.

The data visualization community consists of people who use data and design to tackle a variety of issues and challenges. Outside of a few specific blogs and tutorials however, there isn’t a place where that community can provide in-depth comments and criticism on data visualization projects. This site is designed to facilitate discussion, debate, and collaboration from the data visualization community.

The site is open to anyone who is searching for feedback on their visualization designs, from seasoned designers and data visualization specialists to individual analysts searching to improve their graphic displays. All types of visualizations are welcome: simple, single line or bar charts to full-blown infographics to interactive visualizations.

If you have a chart that just isn’t working, or getting your message across to your audience, you can upload it to the site, and get really useful, actionable advice from the Community.

Jon is currently the Senior Researcher and Data Visualization Expert at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and he took some time to answer a few interview questions from me about the HelpMeViz site:

Cool Infographics: Who is the target audience of the site?

Jon Schwabish: The site was created for anyone—truly anyone—to seek feedback or submit comments. I want anyone to be able to use the site—from the data visualization expert to the experienced JavaScript programmer to the research assistant using Excel. To attract that broad audience, I decided against using established tools or sites like Flickr, Pinterest, Behance, or Dribbble. Many of those sites require users to create an account, or have some other barrier to easy entry and I wanted to avoid those types of barriers. Additionally, I felt that sites like Stack Overflow and GitHub appeared too difficult for the everyday user. So, although it’s often said that you should refine your audience, I wanted to go broad here to make it as accessible as possible.

Cool Infographics: How often do people post new visualization questions to HelpMeViz.com?

Jon Schwabish: To date, I’ve posted at least one visualization per week. There have been a few weeks when I’ve been able to do more. Interactive visualizations and ones that have a unique design question—for example, how to create something in Excel—generate the most interest.

Cool Infographics: Are you having success getting the audience to engage and recommend design ideas?

Jon Schwabish: For the most part, I haven’t had to engage the audience much on my own; community members have taken most of the initiative to engage with the content, making light work for me on that end. I’d like to see more requests on the design side—questions about font or color or layout. To date, requests have been primarily about tools and creation of the visualization. But I think a lot of people would benefit from asking basic design-style questions.

Cool Infographics: Does it take much of your own time to participate and keep the site running?

Jon Schwabish: It doesn’t take too much of my own time, but that will change, I hope, as the amount of content increases. I oftentimes have to rewrite the text to clarify the challenge or goal. Sometimes I need to tweak an image or extract an image from a larger document. I rarely fiddle with the data—if the person who submitted the visualization could use it to create the graphic, then it’s probably close enough for others to use. I’ll usually correspond with the submitter once or twice to make sure he or she is okay with my edits and then I post the submission.

Cool Infographics: What are the best examples of successful projects posted to the site?

Jon Schwabish: There have been a number of interesting challenges.

• One was sort of built around the idea of a bullet chart
• Not surprisingly, a triplet of pie charts
• Finally, there was a great discussionJon Peltier to write a separate Excel tutorial on his own site and Joe Mako

Perhaps the thing I’m most excited about for the site right now is the live Hackathon that will be held on Saturday, June 28, with Bread for the World Institute. We are inviting 25 coders, designers, and data scientists to help the Institute with two data visualization challenges. I will be live blogging the event and will make the data available on the HelpMeViz site so that anyone around the world can join the discussion and provide his or her own visualization suggestions.

This site is truly made for everyone, and I encourage you to check it out.  The feedback can range from Excel charting tips to visualization programming code.  You can upload your own charting challenges, offer recommendations on other people’s charts or just lurk and learn from the advice of other experts.

If you’re in the DC area, be sure to check out the HelpMeViz Hackathon event on Saturday, June 28th! HelpMeViz will bring together coders, data scientists, and data visualizers in Washington, DC, to help Bread for the World Institute with two data visualization challenges for its 2015 Hunger Report, which focuses on why women’s empowerment is essential to ending global hunger.

Thanks to Jon for creating this incredible resource, and taking the time to answer a few questions!

What Makes the Perfect Blog Post?

What Makes the Perfect Blog Post? infographic from blogpros.com takes information gathered from 100 highly ranked blog posts and puts it together so we can learn from those best practices.  Even though the infographic can stand on its own, it was published as a companion piece to a much more detailed article.

Always interested in what goes into the best content we can publish, we recently performed an analysis of 100 top blog posts across a number of popular sites, including Forbes, Mashable, KISSMetrics and SearchEngineWatch. The data speaks for itself, but the conclusions are up to you. What do you see in the data? Here’s what we think.

The simple color palette makes the data visualizations very easy to read.  Some of them are very well know publishing tips like providing social sharing buttons and including images.  I don’t believe that the number of characters in a title has any bearing on its success, but good titles are very important.

I don’t know if any of these factors had any influence on whether these blog posts were popular or not.  These are purely observations by the designer and may be considered to be correlated instead of causing blog post success.

Marketing FAIL: Infographics Hidden Behind Registration Walls

There’s a growing marketing practice that I think is a huge marketing mistake. I’ve seen a number of infographics being published by companies that require the reader to enter their name, email address and other contact information before they can even view the design. This “registration wall” is a way for marketers to gather the contact information from the readers so they can send out additional marketing emails later. In my opinion, publishing an infographic behind a registration wall just doesn’t make any sense.

Here’s an example of what you might see on one of these registration wall pages:

I completely understand putting valuable content behind a registration wall as a method to capture the contact information from potential leads. I get it.  Assuming the hidden content is closely related to the company’s business, the audience interested in that content is likely to represent a pool of potential customers. If they’re willing to give up their valuable email address to gain access to that content, they are probably a fairly strong potential customer (or a competitor checking out your valuable content!).

However, infographics are the wrong type of content to use for this purpose. The companies I see that are hiding infographics behind registration walls are missing the benefit of infographics, which is to deliver easy to understand information to the audience in a format that’s also easy to share because it’s completely contained within the image file.

First, online infographics are meant to be shared. Infographics are popular online for two reasons, easy to understand information and easy to share. Much easier than text articles or blog posts. As soon as one reader shares the hidden infographic image file on their blog or posts it in social media, the infographic is released to the public and available to everyone without registering. Even if you ask people not to share it publicly, the accepted practice online is to freely share infographics.

Second, the research commissioned by Janrain from 2012 indicates that 86% of people may leave a website when asked to create an account. Most of the audience will just leave instead of going through with the registration process to gain access to the infographic. They never see the infographic, never read the data and never hear the message. 

Third, the search engines can’t see past the registration wall. No keywords, no meta-data, no text. The search engines can’t index the content behind the registration wall, so your infographic won’t show up in search results. Only the short, publicly accessible teaser information on the registration page has any chance of being indexed to appear in results.

Here’s what I recommend. Use a compelling infographic as a top level summary of the more detailed content you put behind the registration wall. All of the people that share your infographic, are effectively advertising your more detailed information. You could even make the infographic landing page on your website also the registration page to get more information.  

This way the infographics are available publicly to view and share, and the free content draws in readers to the registration page. The truly interested readers will also give you their contact information to gain access to the more-detailed report or white paper that you have available behind the registration wall.  Now you have built your brand credibility with a widely shared infographic, and you have gathered a pool of potentially valuable leads.

For more statistics and information about registration walls, check out The Registration Challenge infographic from Janrain:

How to Solve the Online Registration Challenge infographic published by Janrain in 2012.

How often have you become frustrated filling out online registration forms? There is a better way. Janrain has compiled data on some of the most challenging aspects of online registration forms and simple solutions to improve the user experience…and conversion rates.

Update on Saturday, May 17, 2014 at 10:54AM by Randy

This post was also featured on The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randy-krum/marketing-fail-infographi_b_5318544.html

The Explosive Growth of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is definitely a growing trend. Are you in the position to enjoy all of what cloud computing has to offer? The Explosive Growth of Cloud Computing infographic from Eclipse lets you know what you could be missing if you don’t join their network. 

Now is the time to get on the growth curve of cloud services as we are seeing ever-increasing demand for these services – look at how they have developed in the home with subscription services such as Netflix and Love Film. There is a real on-demand economy and as a result, a new, smarter way of working.

So, if it’s time to investigate cloud services for your business it’s also time to look at your connectivity partner, and a partner who provides both connectivity and cloud services will know exactly what you need to ensure a robust internet connection. Look for a partner who is prepared to really understand your business needs and the role of both the cloud and connectivity in those needs; a partner that will tailor-make solutions to your exact business requirements and stay away from the one-size-fits-all mantra; and a partner who provides a high service assurance accompanied by easily accessible monitoring systems so you can be ‘in the know’ regarding your network’s performance.

Great use of doughnut charts, bar charts, logos and icons to tells the story of the growth of cloud computing.

Thanks to David for sending in the link!