March 8, 2010
Fastcompany posted an article today discussing President Obama’s appointment of data and visualization whiz, Edward Tufte, to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, the group that keeps the Stimulus’ Accountability and Transparency Board accountable for their actions. As Fast Company notes, “infographics could sway politics mightily, given their unsurpassed power to convey messages that people remember.” Tufte, an author, lecturer and information design know-it-all has been hired to visualize the progress of the $787 billion stimulus program enacted by President Obama in 2009.
source
For those in the social media world, and more specifically, those involved in data visualization, this may be a crucial event for the industry as a whole. The appointment of Tufte by the President further legitimizes the “infographic” as a useful tool for displaying and conveying information, and as the gatekeeper of data integrity in visualization, he is a great fit for the job. Hopefully Tufte’s work will help to reveal the concrete facts behind the stimulus plan, where the money is being channeled and the overall impact it is having on our economy. For Tufte’s own statement on the appointment, check here.
Published in News
March 5, 2010
Star Wars can apparently be a metaphor for just about anything, even fast food. With McDonalds representing the allies and all second-tier burger joints being the rebels, this graphic, found on weathersealed.com, displays in true galactic fashion the distribution of fast food restaurants across the U.S. The black void is the area controlled by McDonalds, while the color spots represent one of the seven competing chains. With knowledge of the allies’ alarming burger penetration across the country, the rebel tactics appear to be all about increasing density, thus controlling a specific territory. The best example of concentrated resistance is Sonic Burger which apparently has 900 stores in Texas alone.
As quoted on weathersealed.com,
“Each individual restaurant location [on this map] has equal power. The entity that controls each point casts the most aggregate burger force upon it, as calculated by the inverse-square law – kind of like a chart outlining the gravitational wells of galactic star clusters, but in an alternate, fast food universe.”
This graphic is a beautiful rendering of what can be done with a subject, a little math, and a story to which it relates.
via weathersealed.com
Published in News
January 19, 2010
Charting the discography of prolific musicians is quite the undertaking, but Michael Deal has made an outstanding contribution to the Charting the Beatles project. Our favorite is the Self Reference piece, in which he shows the lyrical allusions and connections among different Beatles’ songs. More musically-inclined folks will certainly love the piece that breaks down the song keys of each album. Here is a sample of some of his pieces, and you can view all contributions to the project in process by visiting the Charting the Beatles Flickr pool:
Published in News
December 30, 2009
This year has seen an explosion of infographics, and while they have been around for decades in their current form (at least with regards to illustrated/2D visualizations) and centuries in some form or another, this has been the first year where they have been widely popular on social news sites as a fine addition to the typical arsenal of text/photo/video for content creators to utilize to convey information in a more interesting and digestible way, and to get more exposure to their site in the process. A quick search of Digg.com stories shows the increased usage in the titles of submissions:
Through the creation of many successful infographics, and a few that have tanked, we understand that there is still much to be learned of course, but have also picked up some best practices. By adding designers to our team with decades of experience in print infographics, we also have the benefit of remembering that a fundamental purpose of each piece is to make a complex or boring set of data understandable and interesting by highlighting that which is important. Further, we have always enjoyed the fact that experimentation is still fun and necessary, and in our particular practice of creating a graphic and getting it as much exposure as possible, we are constantly given fresh feedback on which aspects and methods are preferred from people of all ages from around the world who all interpret the message through their own worldviews.
First, at the foundation of our piece, we have solid data. One of our favorite things to do is to work with clients who have proprietary data, as that gives us a unique angle and a fresh source of current statistics. If we have a great idea, but the data isn’t fresh or credible, then it’s best to either table it for later or pursue proprietary data to fill in the gap.
Next comes the question of what to do with that data, and what a good infographic/data visualization does and looks like…this is where the artistic side of the information designer has a chance to shine. Of course you will have inspiration in the back of your mind from stuff that you have seen that you like, but it is best to continually draw from other unconventional resources as well. As much as there are fundamental and appropriate methods to use, there is no reason to just do what everyone else doing.
There was a great thread started by Nathan Yau at Flowing Data in October called “What the **** is Visualization Anyways?” that drew in some great answers from the robust community over there. The first commenter, Christian, gives us a pretty useful standard, saying “(Information) Visualization is an umbrella term for any translation of a set of abstract information into a visual representation with the objective of increasing insight into this information.”
Some of the most visually stunning and complex pieces have had holes shot through them by commenters who immediately dismiss it as needlessly confusing. Or perhaps the piece is very aesthetically pleasing (to us of course, since the artistic aspect is always subjective) but the data isn’t labeled with the level of detail that one person might prefer, say in the case of a piece that is showing a ratio relationship. We ultimately just take the feedback and strive towards that hybrid goal of making our infographics visually pleasing and artistic without drawing away from or distracting people from the (usually most important) goal of making complex data more interesting and easily understood.
David McCandless posted a pretty cool and useful venn diagram at Information is Beautiful called What Makes Good Information Design? that gives a good perspective on some of the necessary ingredients for a universally loved piece: interesting, easy, beautiful and true (click image below to view full size on his site).
As Steve Duenes of the New York Times said in a Talk to the Newsroom Q&A awhile back:
Our criteria for what makes a great graphic varies a little. There are things we attempt, and we hope the result will be spectacular, but we also think there’s such a thing as daily graphic excellence. It doesn’t do us much good to produce a few splashy graphics but stumble on the smaller, routine things. If a reader can glance at a map or simple chart and quickly orient themselves or understand a statistic, and then continue reading the story without skipping a beat, it means we’ve edited and designed those graphics well.
As you can see, their team consistently compliments the news with beautiful, functional and informative graphics that can tell the story on their own, but are presented in line with the editorial analysis of any given topic, which is a nice homage to their newspaper roots.
That said, we have come to a fairly standard, crowd-informed test of the success of each of our infographics. Beyond the obvious and nice-to-hear comments combined with the quantifiable measures of the reach/traffic of the piece, we feel like an infographic has served its purpose when we find people discussing the topic of the piece and the data itself. This perfect condition is difficult to achieve when experimenting with new formats that are not immediately understood, but that is where the art of the process comes in, and as long as the data itself isn’t manipulated or malformed for the purpose of being more visually pleasing, there is typically no harm done (except in cases where ultra-hot pink permanently damages a viewer’s eyes).
Published in News
December 29, 2009
While reading Futuretainment, a great book that is full of minigraphics and absolutely brilliant design, I’ve thought a lot about the future of content on the web and how much the game will be changed in the new decade to come. Equally important, it is valuable to pay attention to which mediums will remain at the core and continue to be a vehicle for communicating important information (and of course to entertain one another). That said, the incredible timing of the person who submitted this Calvin and Hobbes from December 30, 1989 to Reddit is noteworthy on its own, and of course the commentary there represents the thoughts that the finest minds of the internet have to offer on the matter (click to view full-size).
Published in News
December 28, 2009
The New York Times has one again impressed with a cool piece, summarizing the highlights of each year across multiple categories, from what it meant to be maverick in 2000 to what it means now, for example. In this case, we have an Op-chart called “Picturing the Past 10 Years” by Phillip Niemeyer, an art director at the Double Triple art and design studio. The everyday team over there consists of some of the most incredible minds around, and as you can read in this newsroom interview, they have done an incredible job of bringing some of the best elements of print infographics to the web, and then of course building on that with their remarkable interactive pieces as well.
Published in News
