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Comment by wisty | Hacker News Reader

I honestly can't stand the popularity of info-graphics. In UX terms, most of them are just "painting the corpse" - pretty portrayals of fairly meaningless numbers. It's rare to have any kind of context to them (comparisons, time histories, etc), the information per pixel is often infinitesimal.

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.

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Why do you wish that people would change their consuming behavior and not their producing behavior? I think it makes more sense to improve the tools/standards for infographic creation (as you mentioned, there is value there) than it does to ask everybody to become a better consumer.

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.

> Why do you wish that people would change their consuming behavior and not their producing behavior?

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).

The thing that is most horrifically frustrating part about "infographics" is that they take the worst offenses of fad-driven web design and mash them together with the worst offenses of static newspaper graphics.

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!

Well on the bright side, since they already have the code for creating an HTML representation of the objects it should be fairly trivial to make an embeddable version of the infographic which is HTML/JavaScript and which can even be dynamic.

Now that would be really interesting.

What an application like this could do is enable people who understand journalism and statistics but not design to get into making infographics. Even charts and tables are meaningless if they're compiled by people who don't understand what they say.

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