VisualPoint

“Not so long ago, information visualization in the digital humanities rested firmly on the general principles of clarity and brevity typified by Edward Tufte and utilized not only in generic data visualization but also spatial data …

The problem with this conceptualization of information visualization is that works like Tufte’s are dominated by the expectation that such objects be immediately comprehensible to a lay audience.  These are the infographics of such growing popularity and are meant for busy media consumers and executive summaries.”

Babar Suleman discusses the 7 Rules of Great Infographic Design (RT @columnfive: How to Strike the Elusive Balance between Data and Visualization

 They started out as a social media experiment and then suddenly everyone wanted a piece.

A couple years back, if you dropped the word ‘Infographic’ or ‘Dataviz’ in a conversation, you would have been greeted by a good number of confused looks even if you were among other web designers.

Today, so many infographics have gone viral that it’s practically impossible to ignore them. You’ll find them tweeted by your friends who want to share an interesting new find, promoted by companies eager to display their growth trends and utilized by even the White House for its progress reports.

“What do you think is next in the world of infographics and data visualization?

 Ross Crooks, cofounder of the infographics firm Column Five, rounds up some of the most interest”ing trends impacting the discipline.”

“Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.”

Everyone loves a good infographic. It is such an easy way to digest statistics instead of having to read endless lists of boring and confusing figures, and it.

But, what happens if you are searching for a particular visualisation, either for your article or just out of general interest? Yes, there’s the old-fashioned way of searching via Google or trawling through hundreds of sites, but surely you just want a site like Flickr where you can browse through infographics, without having to waste time searching for them?

 This is exactly what Visual.ly is. Think of it as Flickr for infographics and visualisations. Signing up is completely free and there’s some exciting features built into it (with a couple more in the pipeline).

“I never thought much about the terminology freely thrown around in design with anything regarding infographics, data visualization or information design. This has been compounded by the popularity of infographics in major publications. As part of my research for a school project about using data and the Processing language, I felt it was important to understand the words being used in this discipline.

 In this post, I will discuss the similarities between infographics and data visualizations, the differences as well as why it may or may not matter to really understand the distinction.”