Easel.ly - A nice HTML 5 infographics editor
easel.ly
easel.ly
Still, they are popular for a reason - people know numbers are important, but will only look at them if they are nice and colorful. I guess I really just wish more people would look at tables, or simple line graphs; or read articles with a few numbers in them.
They're almost always ugly, scattered potpourri of unattributed factoids. For the minority that do list sources, they're encoded into a fucking image, so they're not clickable to begin with!
"Infographics" are an abomination, and it is maddening that these guys have built a rich editor that starts with an HTML representation of their objects, and then freaking exports to a format that loses some of the most critically relevant information!
Now that would be really interesting.
In any case, I feel like these kinds of reactions happen with the advent of every new communications "technology." When the masses get some new tool in their hand they overwhelmingly produce a bunch of shit. After the dust settles some small percentage of those people rise to the top by creating quality which is then happily consumed by everyone.
For me the best example is looking at the historical reactions to the printing press. At that time the only books were hand scribed by monks and they were all religious texts of high quality. When the printing press came out many people were upset that books would ruin education for everyone because so much crap would be printed. We all know how that turned out: a lot of crap WAS printed, but tell me the printing press was a bad idea. Now I'm not saying infographics are the next book, but they are a new communication medium.
Because it's a wish, and it's OK to wish for impossible things.
You're right - it's not an ideal world, and an imperfect solution is better than nothing. People need to know more facts, so they can contextualise new facts. Infographics (even bad ones) can help there. And good infographics do exist (though they can be rare).
- "Infographics are 30 to 40 times more likely to be viewed and shared vs. text." - an un-cited statistic they put upfront. almost ironic
- Left and right arrows don't do anything, they just hash the url
- Their feedback url isn't an actual place for feedback, it's a survey
- Click login - the back end is wordpress (?!)
- If you view the source, you can quickly see that this was made with a pre-assembled wordpress theme (http://test.nattywp.com/preview.php?theme=ifolio)
- The rest of the source is an absolute mess with inline styles and scripts
... if this is the amount of effort put into the landing page, it's hard to trust the rest of it...
Your point about Powerpoint is spot on. And the bonus there is you can directly cut-paste graphs from Excel into it with the least amount of hassle.
It has the canvas drag drop and integrates with google spreadsheet or your database to build infographics style dashboards. Infographics without data is a static image, data adds life to it.
I signed up and began skimming around. Not sure if you're just overloaded with traffic or if your lightboxes are having a hard time loading, but I can't preview any of the themes at the moment. Half of the time the lightbox preloader isn't going away.
Also, please consider adding more hotkey bindings for things. I really would prefer using my mouse as little as possible. I was trying to delete elements only to find that the delete hotkey doesn't work.
Also, as mentioned by adityar, I'm not sure what to do with your charts section. I can't see how the data can be manipulated, if at all.
Lastly, your objects paginator isn't paginating for me. I click on another page, watch the increment, but the icons don't change.
1) support for characters outside ASCII (at least latin1, accented letters do appear as a space)
2) better copy/paste. Right now it has problems (FF12)
3) Custom page size
and it will be an excellent tool. Keep up the good work.
I think the real value you could be creating is if you're able to get tons of designers giving you their 'infographic themes' for cheap, and then charging for access for the app. However, you'd have to make it more 'general', a lot of the themes seem to be very specific, for example, one is for some kind of data around the US demographics;
However if someone provided me of a piece of software to this effect (producing output in open formats) then I'd be all over it. Where is this software?
Personally, I feel like that if all infographics were the same, it would loses its appeal. The purpose of an infographic is to display information visually and grab attention at the same time. It's a step up from the typical graph. That said, getting designers to design new themes and providing them a cut might be an interesting way to monetize.
"When your ready export your infographic."
That should be:
"When you're ready export your infographic."
"When you're ready, export your infographic"
(and that arguably isn't...commas are important)
It's just curiosity really, what's the technical hurdle in this case for IE?
But to suggest an answer to your question, I think we may finally be at the point that people can let grudges of the past go and realize the people working on IE today are not the people who created the problems associated to IE6 in the past.
At the least the website in general is rather nice about it all.
Honestly, like many people, I'm more than a little annoyed at the popularity of low-information-density infographics. That said, I like the idea behind this project, as a tool like this could definitely encourage people to create better, richer infographics with more interesting data. However, if this is to be the case, the "chart" module should be the first module that you get working correctly - charts are THE most important part of infographics, everything else is just fluff. The fact that the most important feature is currently just a placeholder does not bode well for this project.
I will stay optimistic about the future of this tool, but call me when you get charts working, until then it's basically just a drag and drop design toy.
1) you're creating a html5 app but you cant disable the buttons on your slider? you only have 1 slide so disable the arrows
2) you need some sort of demo of what the finished product looks like. doesn't have to be editable... just show me what it makes.
I hope you paid the correct license for these things.
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.
Once you come to conclusion, you keep rethinking and validating that these are the right conclusions and once confirmed the next challenge is how to articulate your conclusions to the world.
You then go to your designer and give enough information to be translated to infographics/dashboard. You see it is a very involved process.
I always think my data can be easily converted to a bar chart, line or pie chart. Rest all are variations of the same. If you have a third dimension then you go to bubble or scatter charts. So visualization without data is just a wireframe
Thanks for all the great feedback.
hitting "update profile" (tried to change my password) results in an empty page with just your header. (still pointing to profile.php)
Fab. Thank you.
You could argue that Inkscape is just a svg program, while this site is "easy" to use.
And yet, it seems to me a couple of svgs with palettes and objects, maybe some reference fonts and a bunch of tutorials on what are the key points of an infographic would suit a better purpose.