As someone who has at many different points in his career created infographics, I don’t really like them. And I get why most people who are used to writing reports also dislike them. I mean sure, the medium is printable, downloadable, and tweetable, but so much of the time it’s all sizzle no steak. And […]
Serve up Survey Data with a Menu Infographic
During this week’s Thursday discussions over at diydatadesign we’ll be talking about different strategies for visualizing survey data. Preparing for that call inspired this post. The Problem Surveys are not setup in a narrative format. So after the results roll in and it’s time to sit down in a meeting to go over the results, you could be […]
Why you should create a minimum viable visual
The infographic was not going to be a finalist in any design competition. The font was tiny. The few colors just didn’t seem to gel. It was printed small with strange dimensions. Definitely not going to find this one on any blogger’s top 100 list. But that’s out of context. Listening to the evaluator talk […]
Easy Stackable Infographic
Here is an easy way to create an infographic using power point. This time for web publication. If you publish a set of images stacked on top of one another they appear as a single image. So to create an infographic, just create a series of slides with alternating background colors and export as images. This […]
Building an Alternate Index Infographic
There is no single way to create an infographic. Styles depend greatly on the content, audience and purpose. Today’s post is the first in a longer series focused on practical data visualization. Each post will cover a different style of visualization that attempts to solve a specific problem. You have many audiences Funders, politicians, researchers, […]
Infographics without illustrator
Want to design an infographic but don’t know how to use illustrator (a.k.a. the thing most designers use for infographics)? You have a lot more options these days with template based sites like piktochart, easelly, and infogram. You can also use a photo collage builder like pixlr or fotor to lay it all out. But one […]
Engaging stakeholders with 7 cartoons, including 6 new ones
One of my favorite things about evaluation is that there is a need to communicate findings and evidence to a wide variety of audiences. It’s not enough to just do the evaluation. You need to make the results digestible for all sorts of people. Then you need to reach those people. This means explaining important academic concepts to […]
Poop
I had trouble coming up with the brainpower necessary to write a nice data viz post this morning. So instead, I watched this video from the infographic-friendly Gates foundation and thought I would share. An example of how to approach a taboo subject with an animated web video.
The design approach to data visualization: Visual.ly
Last week we saw the launch of visual.ly, an online space to explore, share, and (one day) create data visualizations. I’m a big fan of attempts to explain complex concepts through visualization. I’m also very comfortable with complex datasets, of course there are many who are not. Data visualization makes data approachable. Data visualization is […]
Fresh Spectrum Toon: Info-Roni
Ok, I just created an animation using GoAnimate. The site makes it really easy to create animations. It makes its money in a similar way to popular social web games like farmville. You get a stripped down version for free, then you pay for additional items and features a la carte. Here is the […]