I contribute to a site that does a lot of interactive visualizations and works with artists that do more static infographics.
Because we display them time to time we get massive amounts of email from companies that paid to have an infographic made (usual on a subject not related to their biz) and slap ads on the bottom. I've never posted one and can't for the life of me figure out why any legit business (maybe that's my answer) would do that.
The data part seems to be the biggest thing people fail to understand. If you don't have compelling data or the graphic doesn't lend itself to understanding the data... then what's it for?
Totally agree...
We're trying to figure out how to manage infographics... We've been contracting with infographic designers we think are good (based on their portfolios) and giving them a try, sometimes not having much success :(
It especially sucks because we give so much detail to every design at http://feefighters.com ... so it hurts when we put something like this out there which gets dissed on (though I totally agree with the design comments made here)
OPPORTUNITY: if you are a good infographic designer (will design things that won't hurt my head), please email me with samples!
Or- if you've had success with infographics, can you share tips?
The general complaint should be a different point - it's the misrepresentation of data that is the real culprit here. Infographics are just a way to represent or misrepresent data.
IF you're making an infographic to help your average consumer facing business, the purpose is to get links and traffic, not to share information. The average person doesn't care how accurate information is or how it is projected - but they do care how interesting it looks and how shocking the facts are.
I don't get it. Is a collection of made-up facts supposed to constitute satire or something?
> Infographs are usually very pretty, but it's really a gimmick, they're not useful content, it's link bait to get traffic to a blog.
Why so cynical? God forbid somebody represent data in an aesthetically pleasing manner. If infographics are a gimmick, then so is anything anybody ever does to make their creations interesting to read/view/use.
I feel like this site would be a lot better if it didn't purport to be an infographic creation tool at all.
The core concept of infographic templates is completely flawed. Infographics are supposed to be designed around the data which they wish to represent, so how could one design work for various sets of data? Sure you can categorize and make themes for say food or finance, but what about the scale of data? Wouldn't that be completely unique to every case?
"Create free custom infographics in seconds" should be a huge red flag for anyone wanting to actually represent data accurately.
This would be a lot more useful if it were just a showcase and maybe a place for businesses to go to find the best infographic artists and hire them for contract work.
Getting pretty tired of all these posts that are telling me what I should hate. It's just infographics. They're not a substitute for hard core analytics and they're not supposed to be. It's a designers spin on providing summary level data that sits somewhere between the words of design and analysis. If you want a quickly digestible, publishable bit of content, use infographics. If you want to provide more meat to your message, don't use them.
I'm not a big fan of infographics because I keep thinking of Mark Twain saying, "There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." I'm always thinking, "What are they trying to pull over on me, and how should I be arguing against it?" The infographic usually hides more than it reveals.
I like data visualization when I'm doing it for myself, or when a trusted colleague is using it to share information. Certainly there is much that can be seen more readily from a graphic than a number. But infographics are propaganda.
I've never understood why infographics are so popular on the web. The power of the web is that you don't have to present ideas as static images with no interactivity or extensibility.
In general, I think the problem breaks down this way:
1) Humans respond in intuitive, predictable ways to graphics, particularly with a greater emphasis on emotional response. (As opposed to an analytical response.)
2) All information sources have bias, and any marketing competence on the part of the infographic creator will tend to subconsciously amplify the bias of the graphic's creator.
3) Combining the creator's bias with the infographic's tendency to more easily invoke emotional responses over analytical ones results in a reaction more couched in that emotion than in logic.
IIRC, USA Today was criticized for this, decades ago.
[edited to fix concatenation of numbers to a single line.)
Just some people put too much photoshop and too little Tufte in their infographics. Filling the page with chartjunk and slathering on effects that lie with art instead of clarify with art.
I noticed that their popularity is perfectly justified when I didn’t remember even once closing an infographic before scrolling down to the very end of it (and some of them has been very long).
I don't think this is true, and even if it is, unless you're in the business of making mouse wheels a user scrolling to the end is not the goal - getting a conversion (sale, signup, phone call, etc) is. The fact you scroll to the end isn't very interesting - do people call the companies they see infographics from? I don't.
A good infographic is a representation of interesting data with an imaginative and informing design. Making something into an infographic doesn't have any inherent benefit. They need real thought and hard work to be useful. There are popular, dare I say even beautiful infographics, but many are dull, unimaginative ways of reporting data without actually adding anything. They're created as if Excel had an "export table as cartoon" feature.
People are as likely to ignore a bad infographic as they are to ignore a bad website.
No, but I am probably not your target market. Who do you imagine your target market to be?
I urge you to consider that an infographic's job is to provide a compelling narrative that helps the viewer take away a new data-driven truth. Without the story, any machine-driven infographic would just be pointless, no matter how nice it looks.
Exactly. Sites like visual.ly are the 99designs of infographics. They're graphic design 101 projects with often misleading/misinterpreted data thrown on a document the size of the moon. They're hard to read and even harder to digest.
I hate infographics. Although I understand the need for an overview of a subject, I don't think it's a substitute for a meaty body of text. I feel that anytime a subject is processed and homogenized into a one page graphic that I'm selling myself short. They remind me of "talking points" you see on the "news". I'd rather just read a body of text and then give myself some leeway to discover more about the topic in my own way. I have the patience and willpower to truly discover some truths, instead of parroting a factoid from an infographic. I do like how they are being used to draw people into a topic, and I do understand how data scientists are redefining visualization, I just don't like to see a ton of them for no reason other than being trendy.
The problem isn't the infographic it's people spouting bullshit statistics. This is hardly a new problem, learn which sites are trustworthy and which are not.
The only 'problem' is that infographics are really good at getting across a message and far more human friendly than just statistics.
As a designer I'd like to thank you for this post. This recent fad of "infographics" (some text in rectangles + pie chart) is quite sad. These things are information graphics about as much as fake lens flares were graphic design in the 90s.
Side note: are you serious about people paying for this?
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it seems like a pretty cool way of building these things. On the other hand, I feel as though putting tools like this in everybody's hands just leads to shitty visualisations.
Data visualisation is a bit of a science, and using it incorrectly can be hugely misleading. This is like saying "here, you can create professional-looking presentations with this new product called PowerPoint."
I don't want to put down the work that's gone into this app, because it looks great. I'm just annoyed with the number of shitty infographics that get churned out by people with no data visualisation experience.
It's a pity that infographics are abused so often, because they're honestly not a terrible way to communicate interesting statistics. I mean, the fact that they're getting ordinary people to look at data and pass it along to friends is pretty impressive. They do have an accountability problem though. Someone should build a platform for making, sourcing, and commenting on them.
I contribute to a site that does a lot of interactive visualizations and works with artists that do more static infographics.
Because we display them time to time we get massive amounts of email from companies that paid to have an infographic made (usual on a subject not related to their biz) and slap ads on the bottom. I've never posted one and can't for the life of me figure out why any legit business (maybe that's my answer) would do that.
The data part seems to be the biggest thing people fail to understand. If you don't have compelling data or the graphic doesn't lend itself to understanding the data... then what's it for?
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