Thursday, December 5, 2013

The Many-Faced Infographic

My fourth long-form article about infographics and data visualization has just been released by Peachpit, the publisher of The Functional Art. It's titled The Many-Faced Infographic: Brooklyn, Elephants, and the Visualization of Data.

Here's the main takeaway:
"When creating interactive visualizations for general readers, there's nothing wrong with trying to be a bit innovative and experimenting with unusual graphic forms if they are reasonably efficient and if you wish to bring attention to your graphic. But then, whenever it's possible—and it usually is—offer readers the opportunity to visualize the data in multiple and perhaps more traditional ways."
The previous articles in the series are:

1. Emotional Data Visualization: Periscopic's "U.S. Gun Deaths" and the Challenge of Uncertainty

2. Heroes of Visualization: John Snow, H.W. Acland, and the Mythmaking Problem

3. A Confederacy of Truth-Tellers: The Bright (But Challenging) Future of Small or Independent Visualization Teams

Expect the fifth one a month and a half from now.

50 Years of Change, a visualization project made by Cartography graduate students
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is one of the graphics discussed in the article.