Trend: Info-graphics

by Matt on 22 June 2011

The internet is awash with them (tech blogs in particular). Good or bad thing?

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Pros

Firstly, it has to be said that I enjoy a good infographic as much as the next man. In fact I enjoy making them and do so for The Football Ramble (you can see them on my website).

I find it’s a really interesting challenge to visually represent sometimes complicated data and make it easier to understand. It’s like a meeting of science and art – or more accurately, maths and design. And it’s really hard to get right. So much so, that when you do crack it, you feel like you’ve created a little timeless nugget. People speaking different languages and with little understanding of the subject should be able to ‘get it’.

So I don’t think anyone gets it right all of the time. But those that have a good hit ratio and do interesting things include the New York Times (leaders in the field), David McCandless (great original approaches, very colourful) and Good (hit and miss but some epic ones). The Spanish newspaper Marca are awesome for sport stuff too.

So explore these and learn what great infographics are about - they should give you an understanding of tough content or tell a story visually. And if you’re anything like me, get you a bit excited.

Cons

But with all these great infographics that have appeared and got people excited, along come a whole host of imitators. People who see pretty colours and shapes with a bit of text on it and think that’s all there is to it. And so go mad creating absolutely massive jpgs. And I mean big – a quick google for internet history infographic in particular reveals this.

Here’s some more tech-related infographics that get all carried away: http://smashinghub.com/history-of-computers.htm, http://techpp.com/2010/08/21/history-of-the-internet-infographic/, http://mashable.com/2011/04/17/web-design-evolution/

See, all they’re doing is just putting tons of text on some shapes in a jpg and telling the story that way. Congratulations, you’ve just made your content massively impenetrable. There’s no reason not to do that with HMTL and CSS, making it more search-engine friendly, accessible and just generally easier to read and understand. Tom Morris writes a decent (if a bit extreme) rant on this in more detail.

None of these are taking datasets and helping you, the user, understand them. Or letting you explore the patterns at your own pace. They’re just telling you a linear story. Something text has been great at for years. Sadly they’re on the rise – not a day goes by without several cropping up on Twitter.

A true infographic is probably driven by data and so perhaps datagraphic is a better term for the real ones. A colleague of mine goes into more detail on this. But then that makes it sound a bit geeky and I’m happy to cash in on the new understanding and popularity of the infographic term to promote my work.

So a request: think before pointlessly turning your text into a pretty picture. Challenge yourself to actually tell the story visually or stop wasting everyone’s time.

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