The Boom of Big Infographics | Hacker News Reader

The Boom of Big Infographics

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31 pointswherespaul13 comments

Uh, Wade Meredith here. That second infographic is mine. It was the most successful blog post on Healthbolt.net (my blog at the time, I ended up selling it to b5media a few months later). I had a couple of other big hits, but this was my favorite.

I'm glad they remark in the OP about the post taking on a life of it's own. It has 4k+ comments and has turned into an informal support group for people to share stories about quitting successes and failures.

It's pretty much the first big graphic design project I ever undertook (I had built a Wordpress blog and was reskinning it every month or two to teach myself how to code, so I thought should start getting serious about design as well). It was by far the most rewarding post I made on that blog out of about 400 over the course of 9 months. I think it's helped a lot of people and I'm glad it seems like it's going to help more in the future.

The actual post finally ended up here with an add-on article tacked onto the front of it (http://blisstree.com/feel/what-happens-to-your-body-if-you-s...)

While the content changed hands a few more times over the last 3 years apparently on of them involved the first ~400 posts on the blog, which I wrote, getting attributed to "Liz Lewis". (Disappointing.) Considering I sold the blog and the content with it, though, there's nothing to be done about it. Such is life.

The important thing is that the post itself, originally published in 2007, now has 4,239 comments and the last one was left 20 hours ago. Pretty cool stuff.

TL;DR I made the "most popular" infographic of 2007 while I was still wet-behind-the-ears as a designer, and it's cool to see it leading a life of its own 3 years later.

Nice work. It doesn't suffer from the problems of many of the other infographics, since it's not claiming to be some kind of unbiased presentation of data; rather it's an unashamed advertisement for the idea that you should quit smoking.

I read this entire article.

When I got to the end I realised I actually hadn't read this article. I'd just looked at the pictures and felt like I'd read an article anyway.

I went back to actually read the article but the ten-point text next to the 90-point text made the 90-point text far too mesmerising.

This may, perhaps, explain some of the appeal of giant infographics.

Info graphics irritate me, they dumb down what is already trivial to digest. I'm sure it fits right in with 'talking points', 'power points','infomercials' and 'advertorials' but it isn't for me.

I prefer to read some solid text, graphics optional, if they have to be there to illustrate the points in the text then so be it.

People are lazy, and infographics seem to tap in to that so I don't doubt they'll be successful, but it is just another step on the road to idiocracy. Keep those gray cells working, use them or lose them.

Someone ought to write about the scourge of infographics.

Is that pretty much the essence of all of Tufte's work?

Not that infographics are bad per se, but that there are good and bad ways to graphically represent data, and you should know what they are.

they pretend to convey unbiased information

Indeed. The infographic about which news source's audiences are better informed is a pretty good example of "how to distort with infographics":

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/15-07/s...

Three big problems:

1. On the left, did they really only ask three questions in an attempt to find out who was better informed? If not, what happened to the other questions that (perhaps) didn't support their point? If so, why did they only ask three questions when they could have asked more? Also, the wording isn't specified; what does it mean to be able to "identify Scooter Libby"?

2. The area of those bubbles is not proportional to the number inside. I'm pretty sure they've made the radius proportional to the number, so the area (and psychological bigness) is proportional to the square of the number, thus exaggerating relatively small differences.

3. On the right hand side, the questions are arranged so as to decrease the visual significance of the four questions where knowledge increased from 1989 to 2007 and increase the visual significance of the four questions where it has decreased. Then, despite the fact that knowledge has gone up in four cases and down in four, they stick the big headline "Americans know less about politics than they did in 1989" at the top and you have to look very carefully at the data to realise that it's pretty much a wash.

Anyway, while infographics can be useful, you want to be very careful in reading them. Ask yourself: "Why would someone go to so much trouble to present this information visually if they weren't trying to distort it in some way?"

I understand that images and visual representations are powerful, and impact more people in large part because they require less in terms of time/attention, so they have the power to mislead. But to label all infographics as a scourge and as automatically biased is quite a generalization. For that matter, how do they claim to be unbiased in the first place? Data and studies are spun towards researcher bias at times regardless of the end format. To disregard infographics or despise them versus black and white text and Excel tables doesn't make sense. It is a medium, and a powerful medium at that, but so is text, photography and videos, and they can all be used to objective ends or subjective ends, and none is ever pure and holy or automatically accurate (nor are Excel tables and the raw data used to inform the stylized infographics).

Text may be black and white physically, but can express a wider range of nuance.

Could anyone point me to some source of good vector graphics "clipart"? The pictures in Infographics are pretty and would be awesome if I could use some in presentations as well.

Can anyone suggest a good app/tricks to make infographics?

Here is a good post if you are looking to get started. There isn't really a 'best' program or a shortcut, just go with what you feel most comfortable with and start exploring datasets (census, BLS, data.gov, Guardian UK are all good sources) to get a feel for what is most intuitive.

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