Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling
By Jason Lankow, Josh Ritchie and Ross Crooks
4/5
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About this ebook
Transform your marketing efforts through the power of visual content
In today's fast-paced environment, you must communicate your message in a concise and engaging way that sets it apart from the noise. Visual content—such as infographics and data visualization—can accomplish this. With DIY functionality, Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling will teach you how to find stories in your data, and how to visually communicate and share them with your audience for maximum impact.
Infographics will show you the vast potential to using the communication medium as a marketing tool by creating informative and shareable infographic content.
- Learn how to explain an object, idea, or process using strong illustration that captures interest and provides instant clarity
- Discover how to unlock interesting stories (in previously buried or boring data) and turn them into visual communications that will help build brands and increase sales
Use the power of visual content to communicate with and engage your audience, capture attention, and expand your market.
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Reviews for Infographics
19 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What I appreciate most about this book about "the power of visual storytelling" is its practicality. The treatment of the topic is complete, inclusive of underlying principles and plenty of real examples. Moreover, it motivated me sufficiently that I want to not be using words in this review (but I'll save that for another time, with a different medium and a different tool set). A good infographic is engaging and simple. The visual devices can vary, but visuals are key. This book is very focused on commercial success, and the authors heavily leverage their own consulting business stories.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Amazing source of ideas and spot on explanations on what to use when. Totally worth it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the 1st book I have read on Infographics, so although I cannot compare it for any information it may be missing or lacking, it certainly did inform me a lot by covering what I believe I SHOULD know, and definitely covered all what I believe I NEED to know.
So, it was interesting, easy to read and understand, and enhanced my knowledge. It gave me what I wanted.
Thanks.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Now i got a good and complete book on info-graphics . Table of content of this book sounds like great . Every person who are in the communication business take a time and read it .
Book preview
Infographics - Jason Lankow
CHAPTER 1
IMPORTANCE AND EFFICACY: WHY OUR BRAINS LOVE INFOGRAPHICS
In De Architectura, Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius states that there exist three standards to which all structures should adhere: soundness, utility, and beauty. In their paper, On the Role of Design in Information Visualization, authors Andrew Vande Moere and Helen Purchase point out that these standards can and should also be applied to information design and the various applications that serve this purpose. They state that a good visualization should be sound; that is, the design’s form should be suitable for the information it depicts. It should be useful, enabling the viewer to derive meaning from it. And of course, as with all design, it should have aesthetic appeal that attracts the viewer’s attention and provides a pleasing visual experience.
This framework provides a solid basis that anyone can use to judge the value of visualization. However, we will use a slightly different categorization for the purpose of discussing the positive effects of infographics. We will refer to beauty as appeal, and divide utility into the areas of comprehension and retention—as these are the three basic provisions of all effective verbal or visual communication methods:
1. Appeal
Communication should engage a voluntary audience.
2. Comprehension
Communication should effectively provide knowledge that enables a clear understanding of the information.
3. Retention
Communication should impart memorable knowledge.
We will address the need to have a sound design on a more practical level in Chapter 9 (Information Design Best Practices) when we discuss principles for the practice of information design.
Images and graphics should always look appealing and encourage viewers to engage in the content. It is important that we examine why this is the case and identify the primary elements that lead to this appeal. This is certainly the first and potentially most challenging step in conveying a message: getting the recipient to commit to hearing what you have to say.
People have long accepted the notion that a picture can replace a thousand words, and similarly, that a simple graph can replace a table full of numbers. Basic visualization allows us to immediately comprehend a message by detecting notable patterns, trends, and outliers in the data. This chapter will look at how visualization achieves this feat so easily while other forms of communication fall short.
Further, we’ll determine how we can make those visualizations more memorable. The democratization of media, especially online, has given us a great variety of options that we can use to consume our news, videos, and funny pictures—and generally educate ourselves on myriad topics. However, the downside to this exponential increase in stimuli is that we tend to lose much of this knowledge shortly after we gain it. While no one should lament forgetting a mediocre LOLcat, it pays to be memorable—especially in the business world. Fortunately, connections have been made recently between the illustrative elements of graphics and the retention rates of the information displayed—and these connections can help us all figure out how to have people remember our material.
This chapter will also discuss the fact that information design lends itself to achieving these objectives, and will seek to understand exactly how and why it does this, based on the way our brains process information. We will not be getting into too much heavy science; rather, our main goal is to understand which elements of design help us reach our specific communication goals, and to leave behind those that do not. For this we will lean heavily on several key works that have covered the science of visualization exhaustively, most notably Colin Ware’s thoughtfully written Information Visualization: Perception for Design.
Finally, we will identify several of the divergent schools of thought. We’ve concluded that the differences in these approaches are largely rooted in the failure to recognize that varied objectives necessitate varied approaches to the practice. That is, a design whose primary objective is to give the viewer information for analysis cannot be considered, designed, or judged in the same way as one whose primary goal is to be appealing and entertaining while informing. We will discuss these varied approaches to each unique objective and elaborate on the practice in the applications chapters (3, 4, 6, and 7). We will then discuss how we can use these different methods to serve our three basic communication provisions: appeal, comprehension, and retention.
VARIED PERSPECTIVES ON INFORMATION DESIGN: A BRIEF HISTORY
OBJECTIVES OF VISUALIZATION
APPEAL
COMPREHENSION
RETENTION
VARIED PERSPECTIVES ON INFORMATION DESIGN: A BRIEF HISTORY
Many a heated debate over the proper approach to information design is raging online nowadays, which seems to raise the question: Why all the conflict in the friendly field of pretty picture creation? The debate surrounds just that: The role of aesthetics and decoration in the design of infographics. To understand the underlying tension, a bit of background is necessary.
Science and publishing have used information design and visualization as a communication tool for centuries. However, study and development in the field has mostly been dominated by academics and scientists, who are concerned primarily with understanding the most effective way to process and present information to aid viewers’ analyses. These efforts are driven by loads of research, with highly theoretical consideration; when practical, the focus is on using software to process and visualize data sets. For years, only a select few—an educated, knowledgeable, and skilled group of individuals—have discussed and practiced visualization in this sense. Then the Internet caught on. Around 2007, interest in infographics (mostly editorial in nature) began to grow on the web, as people shared old infographics like Napoleon’s march on Moscow (Figure 1.1) and newer creations such as those published by GOOD Magazine (Figure 1.2). Suddenly, a whole new group of experts
was praising, sharing, and critiquing (mostly critiquing) any infographic they could find.
Figure 1.1: Flow map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812.
Charles Minard.
Figure 1.2: You Should Vote Because.
Open, NY for GOOD.
Since then, an impressive number of new infographics have been created as various industries and areas identified different applications for their use. One of the most common was to use editorial infographics for commercial marketing purposes. This new breed of visual took a bit of a different path, both in format and content. The long, skinny graphic, designed to fit within a blog’s width, became ubiquitous and almost instantly synonymous with the term infographic. These pieces used illustration and decoration much more than their traditional counterparts. And as with most marketing efforts, their goal was to use their content and design to attract attention, interest, and adoration for the company that produced them—making each brand a thought leader
in its industry. This was quite a divergence from the traditionally stated purposes of the field, which was purely to use visual representation to aid in the processing and comprehension of