The concept of an infographic is very interesting to me. When you take the time to think about combining worlds of data and graphics, you will realize that it is vastly complex. This documentary gave a good overview of this concept, and did a good job in showing its evolution. It brought up a few aspects of visual information that I hadn’t previously thought about.
Telling a story is such an important concept in relaying information. The documentary highlighted this fact: data can easily be turned into a beautiful graphic, but is it really telling you anything? Is it telling a story? Portraying data, especially massive amounts of it, in a comprehensible way has always been a conundrum and concern in all types of storytelling. I think the development of infographics is a great stride in the right direction in doing so. It seems that graphical information is in infantile stages. It is starting to be used in a completely different way. And this brings me to the second topic that hit home for me in this documentary.
The integration and access to the web has been a major, major impact in the progression of infographics. In this digital age, individuals are expecting information faster. They are taking less and less time to acquire information. It seems that traditional journalism is dead – this is apparent when looking at Twitter and how many people actually use it as their primary news source. Infographics provide us with a way to portray information in an interesting, simple way, allowing people to faster understand what is being presented. Most importantly – it is a great alternative to traditional storytelling, presentation of information, and journalism.
As information graphic designers develop the most effective and innovative strategies for presenting information, I believe it will hold a vast amount of potential. The documentary alluded to this idea – but I can imagine entire news sites being presented as an information graphic, using all kinds of interactive features. I can see it being used innovatively in education as well. It clearly holds a lot of potential and I think we’ll really start to see this as best practices develop.
2 Responses to Visualized Data