I love infographics. My interest began early last year when I discovered The Oatmeal. It’s a website run by a guy who creates comic strips and instructional infographics which often go viral. The topics vary from English grammar ‘Ten Words You Need To Stop Misspelling’ to alcohol ‘Twenty Things You Need to Know About Beer’ and are pretty funny.
Then my colleague Lauren introduced me to the site of David McCandless, Information is Beautiful, and my initial flirtation became a love affair. I was immediately drawn to his beautiful, colourful designs that somehow managed to convey huge amounts of complex information in an astonishingly simple manner. Within days I had a copy of his book and spent my commuting hours poring over his 200 infographics, and wondering which of our clients could take advantage of this new way of communicating.
So where have infographics come from? Are they really some hot new trend? Or are they just modern day versions of the diagrams, maps and graphs we grew up with in school books and in newspapers? Many point to newspaper USA Today for the early versions of infographics. In the late 1980s it featured brightly coloured daily graphics to illustrate sports results, weather forecasts and so on. They proved popular with readers so other publications began to copy this style and today many leading media outlets – Guardian, Mashable and Huffington Post to name just a few – and all sorts of companies are regularly publishing infographics to explain statistics and data. The trend coincides with our appetite for visual information rather than text-based information (think YouTube, Flickr ….).
We’re developing infographics for a few of our clients which we’ll publish in due course. The one above shows how long Catalysis employees have worked here and we’ve got another simple but fun interactive infographic on the Catalysis Join Us page. If you want to have a go at some ‘data visualisation’ yourself, then you’ll find some handy free tools here.
For those of you that haven’t yet noticed the growing wave of infographics, (although I really can’t believe that can be many of you), then take a look at the infographics section on Mashable. Alternatively, here are a few of my favourites. Some will make you chuckle, some will make you reflect on an serious issue… but all should strike you with their design and simplicity. If you don’t want the infographics bug, then don’t read on ….
The Billion Dollar-o-Gram 2009
If the Twitter community was 100 people…