Infographics
Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Jan, 2012...Infographics (information graphics) and data visualisation are current communications buzzwords that apply to using pictures to convey, quickly and effectively, the facts and ideas in a report. Others have different definitions or preferred terminology, but I tend to think of infographics as using common illustrations or graphic metaphors to tell a story that may involve data. I think of data visualisation as encompassing more analytical techniques that enable the viewer to understand rich data from multiple perspectives. Neither replaces tables-and-text analytical reports; rather, they can serve as introductions to a report’s content...
Flowing Data, a website about data visualisation, provides a sampler of visualisations in its Best of 2011 list. Owni.eu has its own list, 20 Great Visualizations of 2011. If you are intrigued and want to delve a bit deeper, check out some of these web posts:
- How to Make Information Graphics and Data Visualizations and 25 Must-Follow Information, Data and Visualization Blogs and RSS Feeds for the Data Professional, both by Joshua Kitlas of Syracuse University School of Information Studies.
- Visual.ly Meetup: the Skills Needed to Design Great Data Visualizations by Aleksandra Todorova of Visual.ly.
- Infographic of Infographics from Ivan Cash.
- A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods from Visual-Literacy.Org.
Still sceptical? See the recent blog post 2012: The Year for Visual Content? from the Australian company Curated Content:
Once people view data through one of these [visualisation] prisms, they’ll never want to look at a table of data again, which is another reason why we’re expecting impressive growth throughout 2012 in this space …
We don’t think for a New York Minute that the growth of visual content comes at the expense of written content, but what we are seeing increasingly is the need for a content strategy that incorporates a number of different formats. Some formats do the job better than others, and the trick is knowing which format will best tell the story you want told...
FreePint post by Peggy Garvin, Senior Contributing Editor, DocuTicker