Infographics: Say a Bunny, Show a Bunny

Dinner seminar on the use and effectiveness of infographics

Presented by Andy Gural, Oct 25, 2011 at Star of India Restaurant in Montreal.

Review by Lynne Wright

Download the podcast and presentation slides.

Graphics have been used as an eye-grabbing and efficient way to convey information since grunting cave people painted bison on cave walls. Over millennia, the use of infographics — basically, the visual representation of knowledge or data — has evolved from a simple expression of “Meat! Good!” to the dead-dull PowerPoint darlings of pie charts and bar graphs to the sleek and playful interactive creations of hipster infographic maniac David McCandless (take a spin through some of his work at http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/).

Being able to package a lot of information into a compact and easily-absorbed visual is a particularly valuable tool to have stuffed into your bulging bag of techwriter tricks. But since we are primarily word people, not graphic artists, learning how to conceptualize effective infographics is a bit like learning to speak a new language.

Here are Andy’s guidelines:

• Apply the “…show a bunny” concept to determine when an infographic would be useful, and what information it should include. The visual should reflect and complement the written content.
• Similar to when writing about a topic, you need to fully understand the material that you want to represent before you can work out a strategy for expressing it effectively as a visual.
• The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is not just hollow rhetoric. If you want to explain how information flows through a server-client network, create a system diagram. An illustration can deliver the information in a compact, easy-to-follow format that’s way easier to get a mental grasp on than having to wade through several paragraphs of descriptive text.
• Imagine the infographic as a way to answer a question; it should tell a self-contained story that makes sense to the viewer even if they don’t read any of the accompanying written content.
• Our brains tend to follow the same patterns when scanning an image, be it a page of text or an illustration; the default is to scan from top-left to bottom-right. To counter-act that impulse, you can use the relative size of objects, font styles and sizes, arrow styles, contrast, colour and empty space to create focal points and guide the viewer on a logical path through the information. Take a look at this infographic and see what elements attract your attention, and how: http://visual.ly/new-world-marketing
• Watch out for errors in proportions and the relative scale of objects. For example, an object representing 200 units should be twice as big as an object representing 100 units. 

The infographic shown at http://visual.ly/worlds-largest-aircraft uses a classic method of indicating scale; it compares familiar objects like elephants, whales, and cement trucks against the size and weight of the world’s largest aircraft, to show how massive the Airbus A380 is.
• When possible, let the visuals speak for themselves; eliminate legends, headers and footers. However, you need to be certain that the symbology you use is easy to interpret. If it’s possible that an absence of labels means that people will be scratching their heads trying to figure out what they’re looking at, then to heck with clean minimalism… maybe a label or two is in order.

Even if you don’t think that you have the need, inclination, or design chops to get into high-end infographics, they have a lot to teach us about how to organize a big meal of information so that it fits on a small plate, in an appetizing and easily ingestible way.

For more samples, see:

http://www.coolinfographics.com/
http://infographicsnews.blogspot.com/