The truth about infographics
My rant for this week: Infrographics – I’m defining this one.
Definition of an infographic
An infographic is a visual representation of quantitative set of numbers. Infographics should represent the scale and representation of these numbers in a visual way. Numbers may be absoloute, percentage based, or on a time continuum.
Word clouds – are infographics too, because the size of the word (visual) is representative of the number (data) of times it appears.
That’s all. Not hard.
But simply because you put-statistics-in-big-gradient-coloured-boxes does not make it an inforaphic. But I think what most people are doing is jumping on the band wagon and using the term infrographic in tweets and headlines to generate more clicks. More clicks to lazy diagrams.
Here is my list of favourite infographics,
Not infographics (but colourful graphs and interesting bits)
- Periodic table of nonsense
- Rise of social media spending
- Mobile social media (just pretty excel graphs, really)
Not even close:
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About Jye
Jye Smith is currently the Digital Strategist for Weber Shandwick Australia. Ranked in B&Ts 30 Under 30, he's a regular keynote speaker and workshop facilitator who specialises in digital strategy, social media marketing, and change management.
Design firm ffunction do kick-ass infographics, my favorite of theirs is packaging for a milk carton designed to incorporate the nutritional info.
Link to their image gallery of the nutrition info milk carton