Articles on Infographics and Infographic Strategy & Design

2012: The Year for Visual Content?

Posted by Cath Pope / in Blog, Infographics, Motion Graphics, Video Content / 3 comments

Rather than take a number in the ‘Top Ten trends for 2012’ SEO queue, we thought we’d do something a little different: make one big bold prediction for 2012, and just put it out there. That way if we’re wrong, the blog title for this time next year will read: 2012: The Year for Visual Content? (Nope)

We’re a content company, creating and curating all kinds of content for our clients, so most of our thinking on this comes from our own anecdotal experience of what clients are asking for, and what we think is often the best way to tell their stories: And increasingly, it’s visual.

2011 was the year infographics went mainstream. A little over a year ago, people still thought of infographics as purely instructive visual guides – like an in-flight pamphlet on how to put on a safety vest. Sure they were helpful, and they enabled people to grasp the concept of – say, putting on a safety vest – very quickly without having to read anything, but they suffered from function at the expense of flair. Despite the lack of “excitement”, they did their job well: they enabled people to use visual cues to grasp complicated tasks…so in this time-poor, multi-tasking, multi –platform multi-messaging content-on-steroids environment we now thrive in, it was only a matter of time before we’d begin to use visual content to do the job a lot faster, simpler, effectively and more dynamically than the old forms of content.

As 2011 progressed, we began to see infographics everywhere. They were being used as marketing tools,  for survey results, timelines, branding tools, annual reports, product launches even CVs! We saw them on the TV to help us understand complex problems, we saw them in print and we defitnely saw then all over the internet. And guess what? People loved them. And not only did they love them; they shared them with their friends on social networks and printed them out and put them on their walls.

In 2011, the infographic got street cred.

Another thing we noticed this year that has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of visualizations, is the growing availability of data.  It’s everywhere. Whether it companies getting thousands of insights from their customers via online behaviour or whether it’s a simple weekly metric of user activity from a Facebook Page or even from your own blog, data became accessible to anyone. So with all that data flowing into our clutches demanding to be analysed, we needed to be able to do it simply and effectively. Enter visualizations! Just about everyone who works in an online environment has access to a dashboard of metrics that can be visualized to make it much easier to interpret and see clearly, patterns emerging in the data.  We call this format Data Visualization, and it can be as complex or simple as people want. And once people view data through one of these prisms, they’ll never want to look at a table of data again, which is another reason why we’re expecting impressive growth throughout 2012 in this space.

We also predict Big Things in 2012 for motion graphics also known as video infographics. This is a visualisation format that we get to have a lot of fun with. Think of moving visual frames that are bright and engaging – add some cool music and you’ve got yourself a visual animation that is not only fun to watch, but great for sharing. Gone are the days of embarrassing corporate drone-fest videos that no one watches and that date quickly. Instead we’ll be seeing a lot more motion graphic videos that are far more engaging, cut to the chase and use visuals to tell the story. Oh – and even better, they are a lot more cost effective for clients.

And that’s just touching the surface.

We don’t think for a New York Minute, that the growth of visual content comes at the expense of written content, but what we are seeing increasingly, is the need for a content strategy that incorporates a number of different formats. Some formats do the job better than others, and the trick is knowing which format will best tell the story you want told.

We love visualizing content, so we’re stoked for what lies in store for 2012.  We can’t wait for more and more engaging and clever visualizations to cross our screen – and we’re pretty excited when we think of the ones we’ll be making too! We have a feeling we’ll see infographics start merging with photographic and video imagry and lots more interactive infographics that create unique pieces of content that are easy to press out and fun to share. We’ll also see the emergence of  ’Data Journalism’, whereby journalists become highly skilled in researching and extracting the best data possible to tell the story.  And we’re also willing to bet that a lot more kids will be sending you CVs like you’ve never quite seen before.

Picture this: 2012, the Year of Visual Content!

And our favourite piece of visual content for for 2012? Right here:

Visualizing How a Population Grows to 7 Billion

 

 

Why You Need to Visualize Big Data

Posted by Cath Pope / in Blog, Infographics, Motion Graphics / 6 comments

We live in an age of data. It’s everywhere.  From the basic metric package that tells you how many people visited your blog on cheese to the thousands of pieces of data and analytics that flow daily into the clutches of Big business – it’s everywhere we look and shaping everything we do.  And now, we want to see it.

According to a recent article on Big Data by the highly respected business outfit, McKinsey Quarterly,

Radical customization, constant experimentation, and novel business models will be new hallmarks of competition as companies capture and analyze huge volumes of data.

McKinsey is pointing to the fact that increasingly, data analysis is becoming a key corporate asset, and a company’s effectiveness it collect it, analyse and share it (both internally and to customers as a value add) will determine their success amongst competitors.  At the same time, along with all these advances in data collation, comes a new problem in how to display it. And even more importantly, how to display it in a way that makes it accessible – and that’s where we get excited.

Thankfully, also emerging at a rapidly innovative pace is the visualization field combining the skills of developers, statisticians, designers, illustrators and journalists, whose job it is to make the massive scale of inhuman data, well...human, or in other words, make all that Big Data accessible.

If this is hard to comprehend, it’s worth noting that we’re already used to seeing some data visualization tools being used quite commonly today. A good example of data visualisation that is standard practice is the tag cloud, where words are counted and visualized by font size in a cluster. Anyone can immediately look at the tag cloud and see, depending on size, how many times the word is mentioned in the article or site. This provides an immediate visual understanding of the main themes represented in the content.  A famous example of the tag cloud can be seen in the analysis of Barack Obama’s inaugural Presidential speech below. The guys at ReadWriteWeb also gave the inaugural speeches of Bush and Clinton the cloud tag treatment, making for some interesting comparisons on Presidential themes.

Other ways to visualize data can include colour patterns and the size of lines (thickness) on a graphical map. You can image just how much data could be visualized over time via strength or weakness of a certain colour. Essentially, good data visualization will exploit key data narratives with visual clues that our humble brains can process a lot faster than the effort it takes to make assessments and comparisons of numerical data in a table. Suddenly, well designed graphics can present huge and complex data stories in a way that is dynamic and exciting – just ask Google’s Aaron Koblin who plotted a map of every commercial flight in America over a 24 hour time period using brighter lines to identify flight routes with heavier traffic.

And naturally as we move onto more sophisticated devices, we’ll expect to be served up more sophisticated visual offerings – we’ll want our visualizations to be animated and to set to awesome music!

Visualization is enjoying the excitement of the new right now, but clearly, is on its way to being the normal technique used to display the findings of all this Big Data we have at our disposal.  And with the ever increasing daily dashboards of data (big and small) we are expected to comprehend, the need to grasp and process data quickly is going to be a business and consumer expectation.

Finally, data visualization means theatre. Thanks to the imagination and power of data visualization, there now exists plenty of opportunities for business leaders to face an audience by standing in front of a giant screen and letting the data be the visual star of the show – assuming the story is a good one to tell, of course.

** Main image is an infographic  illustrating China as a global force via its investments and business dealings, published by The Heritage Foundation.

 

 

Why the Infographic is the Next Australian Content Trend

Posted by Cath Pope / in Blog, Infographics /

Everywhere you turn, people are talking about content. But let’s face it, there’s just so much written content on screen you can read before your eyeballs drop out of their sockets and bounce off the keyboard.

Enter the infographic, the most revolutionary content innovation we’ve seen since the advent of the LOL Cat video (and slightly more useful to society) and one that represents a fundamental shift in online content marketing. For those of you still unsure what exactly an infographic is or does, it’s simple. An infographic is a visual representation of information, data or knowledge. And what’s great about them is an infographic can represent complex ideas and information beautifully and easily, which means it’s easier to interpret and understand. We also call this data visualisation, visualisation or visual journalism – that is, an alternative to words to tell an important story using facts and data in a way that people enjoy and understand quickly.

How do you make an infographic?

An infographic is born out of the collaboration between an illustrator and a researcher. The researcher takes the data and facts and draws out the narrative – the story the data is supposed to tell. The illustrator then brings that narrative alive. The creative process involved in making an infographic is pretty exciting – and pairing together researchers (often journalists) with designers and illustrators is a relatively new collaboration, because the image created doesn’t just accompany the story – it is the story!

Why infographics are here to stay

Because people love them. They enable people to grasp complex and in-depth information quickly and easily and enable the data to play a starring role. People are able to grasp ideas quickly that used to take 1000 words of copy. Who even reads and absorbs 1000 words of copy these days? In this competitive world of online content and shrinking concentration spans, the infographic is thing that catches users’ attention and doesn’t take up too much thinking time to understand – it’s the content format so beautifully suited to the times!

Data is everywhere

Today you can get a metric for just about anything. Data is everywhere – we’re saturated in it. We can monitor just about everything and see relationships and correlations between sets of data. The relationship between cause and effect is all around us. With all this data at our disposal, we need a way to make the best use of it – help people understand its meaning. Infographics are the perfect tool to enable people – and not just ‘numbers’ people – to interpret data.

People love sharing infographics

Especially in Australia. In fact, according to Google Insights, Australia is the sixth highest country in the world to search for infographics. When Mashable (the online magazine focused on digital and tech), looked at its metrics, it noticed an estimated 5% of its content was in Infographics. Of the top 25 posts on Mashable which have gone most viral (in terms of Facebook likes, Tweets and Google +), there were three infographics and two videos on the list. This shows that infographics are more likely to be shared compared to normal “blog” news from Mashable. Not bad for a content form that wasn’t even around in 2009!

Infographics should be a part of your content marketing strategy

Because we’re willing to bet, that out of all the content you have on your site, it’s the infographic that people will respond to and share.

Let’s face it, we get exhausted by all those words on the screen, and often video can be one of two things – cost prohibitive or woefully amateurish. The infographic is the perfect solution – the ideal content format for these days of information overload and time-poor users. And another thing – they’re sexy, cool, colourful and truly creative – no matter how dry your data or how dull your subject matter might be (make that used to be!)

The infographic may be the content breakthrough you’ve been waiting for, and is fast becoming an essential (and beautiful) part of an effective content strategy in an extremely crowded marketplace.

Data Visualisation: The Ugly Duckling Parable

Posted by Cath Pope / in Blog, Infographics, Motion Graphics /

Something very strange is happening in the world of data. It’s along the lines of this: Imagine being born a statistic forever relegated to the boring part of the presentation that sends people to sleep. Then all of a sudden, a dramatic transformation occurs and those statistics and data are turn into something truly beautiful. Now seen as an object of beauty and a tool of engagement, the statistic rightfully claims its place in the pond of visual content – slap bang at the centre of everything!

Everybody has their moment of data clarity. That moment when you looked at data in a completely new way. You didn’t just look at it, you engaged with it. That moment joins a whole lot of other moments in forming a movement called data visualisation – where you’ll never look at data or statistics in quite the same way again – and if our hunch is right, nor should you have to.

Confused? Don’t be. Put simply, there’s an engagement revolution going on regarding our ability to engage with real-world data. That is, people are realizing that you can have fun with data. Going further, you can create awesome visual representations of data that are attractive. Even better, people want to engage with the data – and even better than that, share the experience via their social networks. It’s called Data Visualisation and it’s a key content player for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it achieves the unachievable. It makes data (statistics) engaging to everyone. That’s a huge win!

Secondly, it takes pages and pages of tables and numbers, and renders it, often in a single dynamic visualisation that is ( and here’s the clincher) easy to understand! That means, ‘yeah, I got it the first time!’

And,

Thirdly, it tells your story. You have your data – and that means you’ve got a story to tell. Data Visualisation tells that story in a way that people actually look and listen – both at the same time.

Now that you’re starting to get the visual vibe going, it’s time to look at some awesome examples. While there are literally thousands out there, we thought you may as well hear from the DV Guru himself, David McCandless:

As David said, Data Visualisation enables people to understand context around numbers – and that’s always been a massive challenge (until now). We’re not saying that it’s always simple to find the narrative in a set of data – sometimes it isn’t, but rising to the challenge is what makes the whole thing cool. It helps though, if you know the narrative you’re look for – you know what is is you want these numbers to say or prove.

How do you know if your data needs visualisation?

• Have you put a lot of time and effort into collating a really strong collection of data?
• Does your data point to complex findings that you’re having trouble sharing with simple clarity?
• Does the ‘picture’s worth a thousand words’ theory apply?
• Do you want people to remember the message delivered by your data?
• Do you want people to share your data?

If the answer is yes, then your ugly duckling data could probably do with the swan treatment.  Your audience will love you forever (so will your data).

*Awesome Data Visualisation by blprnt_van  @flicker

 

 

Why Sub Editors are the New Visual Journalists

Posted by Cath Pope / in Blog, Copywriting, Infographics /

The recent round of redundancies affecting Australian sub editors not only points to a traditional media format in decline, but also highlights the changing role and exciting new opportunities ahead for the folks we used to call ‘sub editors’.

In the print media industry, another word for sub editor is indispensible. One ex-sub editor recently wrote an article on Crikey describing subs as having the major responsibility of the last look at a story before the ‘publish’ button is pressed, plus a thousand other responsibilities. The guy goes on to describe the sub editor as ‘the arbiter of good taste’ doing everything from ensuring the story makes sense, to checking facts, spelling, legal issues, working out the breakout copy, the captions, the headlines…the list goes on.

The thing is, as our media frontier widens, we still need someone who knows how to do all the sub editor stuff, and actually keep doing it, but now they also get to apply that smart kind of thinking to different forms of reporting and story telling. And this is where it gets really exciting for people who used to be called sub editors.

One of the newest forms of journalism to flourish in the digital world is the infographic. And if you think that’s just a fancy word for illustration, then you probably need to keep reading.  What makes a good infographic an awesome infographic (insomuch that it does its job of conveying a strong point of view backed up by information visualized by killer design) is the collaboration of a very indispensible individual with a very good designer. There’s two major inputs: working out the meaningful narrative, and then visually designing it.

At Curated Content we work with people who used to be sub editors (and those skills are still highly desired in these parts) and ask them to take their abilities to the next level by becoming visual journalists. Sometimes we need them to help us take information that is exhaustive (or boring or convoluted or even overly complicated) and bring it to life as visual short-hand. To do this well, a visual journalist must be able to look at data or information or work out key words and knowledge stubs and then sit down with the design team and work out how those things can be used to tell a story. Oh – and as you can probably guess, not all infographics are spawned from boring info!

The more we think about what’s in the visual journalist’s toolkit, the more we recognize this as the natural evolution of the sub editor. Wikipedia calls it the practice of strategically combining words and images to convey information. At its best, an infographic can convey meaning instantaneously at a deep level…which brings us back to that guy who wrote that article about the role of the sub editor.

“The subs’ desk usually is like a happy workshop, one where ideas and banter are bounced around the table, jokes are cracked…and where the camaraderie leads to the great ideas that become reality and contribute to enhancing and maintaining the once-cherished integrity of the masthead.”

OMG that’s the essence of what we want from our visual journalists! Who knew they were there all along, creating, producing and perfecting content for the next media frontier just under a different name?

It’s a little bit like the Karate Kid not really understanding how the ‘wax on wax off’ part of the job is going to make him a martial arts guru.

But hey, we do.

The Dawn of Big Data Visualisation

Posted by Otto Ottinger / in Blog, Infographics, Motion Graphics / 4 comments

A heavy hitter in the tech world is opening its kimono and letting you play with its data.

Interested in the correlation of ‘peanut brittle’ as a search term and the Ebola virus? If this potential thematic cross-over excites you, then this is the tool for you.

As its name would suggest, Google Correlate relies heavily of correlation of search terms. These correlations are then trended and a basic visualisation layer plots the statistical smorgasbord for public consumption. Data can be exported as a CSV file and line charts and scatter plots can be shared via Google Buzz and Reader, Twitter, and Facebook.

The export to CSV function is the exciting part. Not the feature itself, but the ability to take Google’s data home to your artist’s loft, kick you feet up, put the kettle on and start creating.

The dawn of big data visualisation is coming.

With the advent of this corporate openness, data that was once hidden behind firewalls and passwords is now exposed in the best possible way. Companies like Google know that the crowd, in this case data visualisers such as Curated Content, can interpret the data, choose a narrative for telling the data’s story, and artistically render it for easy consumption by the public. Vastness and complexity becomes beauty and simplicity.

Why is this just the dawn?

Well, up until now, it wasn’t in the corporate interest for proprietary data to leave corporate hands. Now, tools like Correlate serve the same purpose as a  marketing campaign for the companies which offer them. Increasingly, infographic creators and data visualisers are the artisans and social networks are often their distribution channel. Attribution to the data platform in blog posts and in the footer of infographics is powerful enough to peak the interest of a larger audience, such as small business owners, media buyers, and advertising agencies.

In turn, the data owners sell premium access or consulting services to other businesses. Think of LinkedIn and its premium services targeted to employment agencies and corporate recruiters. (Note: LinkedIn has released its own visualisation tool, LinkedIn Connection Timeline.)

As access to big data increases, so does the need for someone to interpret it and design it for the non-statistical minds.

Cue the data visualiser.

It’s Tablet Time

Posted by Cath Pope / in Blog, Infographics, Video Content /

It helps if you think of the tablet as a Mexican restaurant that customers flock to from far and wide wanting to order the whole enchilada. They can get guacamole just about anywhere, so they’re not interested in that.  What they want is the total Mexican experience. The whole enchilada.

When tablets such as Apple’s iPad, first appeared on the market, users weren’t necessarily demanding an experience beyond the conventions of a web browser or app offered by a smartphone.  Instead they were sold a tale about a special device that would change their digital lives forever. Not only did they buy the story of the tablet, they just about busted down the door trying to get their hands on one. And ever since, the tablet has become the platform of choice for users when it comes to accessing digital content in all its forms

When you say boom times for tablets, how many are we talking?

By now there are tons of statistics available pointing to the rise and rise of the tablet. For our purposes, let’s keep it local by looking at some findings unearthed in Nielson’s Australian Online Consumer Report published in late 2010. The report describes tablets as “the device to watch as a potential game changer for many businesses” and is predicting triple growth (from the current upwards of 8% ownership figures) throughout 2011. Interestingly, the report also indicates the strongest intention to purchase is coming from households with children, also acknowledging that the screen sizes of these devices are already attracting a different pattern of behaviour to that of smartphones. Wow. That means for kids, the tablet could be their birthing experience into digital life.

What kind of content is tablet content?

The rise in popularity of the tablet is one thing, but what people want from the device is something else all together. Users want an experience that sits outside the realm of web browser possibility and beyond the current offering of apps. (If they simply wanted online access on a smallish screen they would have bought a nifty little notebook for a fifth of the price!) No longer is the single dimensional one-way web process (search, get search results delivered, then click) enough. Content  now has its own layered and connected ecosystem that people can easily customize, organize and share. People want to access content in the form of nicely put together articles, videos, galleries, visual maps, audio, infographics and exciting visual representation of data. And then they want to curate that content to suit their own visual needs on the screen (almost like making their own little magazine of content they really like). And here’s the good news – once they’ve done all that, they share and share and share!

Here comes the holy sh**t! moment

The key here is not to panic. Instead, see the elevated content needs of tablet users as a sign of exciting and innovative times rich in possibility and where opportunity is rabid. People want to engage with content in new ways that make it more enjoyable and it’s vital that you try to engage in at least some of these new content formats.

And if I choose to ignore the content needs of tablet users?

Of course digital publishers could choose not to attend the content revolution. But once people have experienced the amazing taste of the whole enchilada, there’s no way they’re ever going to be satisifed by the option  of rice and beans again.