(Video above of Amanda Cox info graphic creator for the New York Times. Didn’t you just want to be her best friend?)
Journalism in the Age of Data was a real revelation to me, and a very exciting one.
I came to the Elon’s i-media program with the goal of telling stories in as many ways as possible. I hope to leave the program with a strong base for being a strategic storyteller for companies, non-profits and entrepreneurs. I had never thought of info graphics as a way to tell stories.
It’s surprising to me to be excited by this, because I have never found info graphics to be very interesting. I have always assumed it’s because I’m a writer and maybe I just don’t visualize data very well. I’ve definitely noticed when it comes to processing information, some people are much stronger on the visual end of things. I’ve worked with people that really can’t think about a concept until they draw it out. Whereas I’ll tend to process information by writing it out, in words. I know that I learn by writing.
I have worried that this may be a particular weakness of mine in the program (and particularly in this class!). It’s a little odd because in some ways, I’m very visual. I mean, I create art; I paint, make homemade cards, love to draw and doodle. If I don’t have pleasing art and colors around my house, it really bothers me. The first thing I do when I move into a new place is hang art. It doesn’t feel like home until the walls are covered with shapes and color. Meanwhile, I’ve forgotten to hook up the utilities.
All this is to say, as a storyteller with some visual skills, watching this documentary gave me hope. It made me wonder if maybe part of the reason I hadn’t really gotten into information graphics was because maybe they weren’t that good. I was assuming I was the problem—I just wasn’t visual enough, I just didn’t process information that way. But maybe many of the graphs and charts we see don’t have enough of a story line.
Turns out all of us, whether we strongly process information visually or not, are programmed visually. Our brains are wired for vision. Because we can see, we’re programmed to understand the world around us through our eyes.
Since I’ve come into the program, I’ve seen some really amazing looking informational graphics. Definitely not the stuff you’re used to seeing in newspapers and magazines. Info graphics have really gone to a new level. However, I do still see that a lot of them look really good, but they are really hard to understand. And isn’t that the point? To understand information? It seems many designers are just showing off their skills, but the reader gets lost in the equation. And the graphic is really for the reader–it’s not about the designers ego. So….therein lies the rub.
One of the main things I got out of watching this documentary (though there were a lot of things!) was I really liked the idea of challenging myself to take some data and not only attempt to make it visually interesting, but to tell a story, to create a visual narrative. Because it sounds like that is a really rare skill set. There’s a lot of really talented designers who can make these amazing looking info graphs, but it seems like a really rare thing for that amazing looking info graph to actually tell a comprehensible story—to be something that’s actually really useful and understandable to people. I think it would be really amazing to be able to be that person—the person that can do both—make it look good, and make it really useful to someone. It sounds like companies really need people like that. It definitely sounds like info graphs would be a really powerful tool to have in your arsenal and in your portfolio.
As far as storytelling goes, one of the designers in the documentary said he felt like the present era of info graphics are similar to the early days of cinema. Along these same lines, Nigel Homes talked about how the interactive elements of the web brings a whole new dimension to the storytelling possibilities for info graphics:
“You’ve got words, you’ve got music, you’ve got silence, you’ve got movement, you’ve got sound effects. That was a revelation to me. Something that once looked very compressed on the page can now breathe.”
Exciting stuff.