I believe information graphics are largely misunderstood. Infographics can be perceived as childish but they can be used for all skill levels. The basic purpose of an infographic is to take complex information and simplify it making it easy to understand. Everyone uses infographics and most likely everyone prefers them over text.
Infographics have the ability to change the way people look at the information. Viewers are forced to compare each variable visually to see which is the best, worst; shortest, longest; least expensive, most expensive; etc. A famous example of a successful infographic is the NYC subway map. More common examples are simple graphs and charts used in reports. The weather channel also uses data visualization by displaying a weather map categorized by color to show the varying temperatures across the country.
I really enjoyed Aaron Koblin’s project on air traffic over north America over 24 hours. He took raw data, technical, and meticulous data and created an interactive infographic to display comparisons between locations, time, and categories. He explains, “it is one thing to say there are 140,000 planes in the sky above us and that kind of registers, but at the same time if you can see the evenflow of the system you can make insights about population distribution and infrastructure, about the decisions that are being made by air traffic controllers.” Aaron used color, high and low saturation, to show the difference in altitude.
With that being said,
Martin Wattenberg explains that there are poorly executed infographics just like there are poorly written stories. Industry professionals are worried about the potential infographic movement because it could be really good or really bad depending on the execution.