

Infographics are broken. We can do better. - lleims
http://erickschonfeld.com/2012/06/28/infographics-broken/

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gte910h
Infographics are fine.

Just some people put too much photoshop and too little Tufte in their
infographics. Filling the page with chartjunk and slathering on effects that
lie with art instead of clarify with art.

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wdewind
I agree, it's hugely frustrating. But the things we refer to colloquially as
infographics are not infographics. Unfortunately, real infographics do not
fill the role they do. Real infographics do not have the same mass appeal that
these do, which is why they are only, in the loosest sense of the word,
infographics. It is also why they survive despite being a worse product, when
compared to real infographics. Rarely are the claimed infographics ever
actually trying to convey information efficiently.

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the internet.

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streptomycin
The problem with infographics is that most of them are made by people who are
not experts and are not passionate about the topic. They're just made for
spam: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about-
infographic...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about-infographics)

Until that problem is solved, nothing will fix infographics. Well, nicer
software might make it easier for spammers to make sensationalist and
misleading (if not simply wrong outright) infographics, I suppose.

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Cyranix
Some of my favorite data presentations recently have come from NYTimes online.
Why? Simple: they're interactive, allowing me to _explore_ the data and the
relationships embedded therein. They're often very elegant designs, too,
partly as a by-product of having to consider usability more than the average
static infographic.

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s_henry_paulson
Infographics are as good as the people that build them and the amount of time
spent on them.

If this guy seriously thinks that building some gigantic inforgraphic
mainframe is going to keep ignorant people from making bad content, he's got
another thing coming.

If anything, it will enable people with even less expertise to put content
together.

I imagine it will be like a rage comic generator, only with numbers and
"facts".

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pyoung
The whole concept/category of infographics struck me us unnecessary. What
started out as a few fairly novel, unique, and interesting approaches to
display data spiraled out of control into these absurd comic-ish designs with
a few stats buried in them.

I will take a nice clean table or chart over an infographic any day. Mixing
'art' and data seems to obfuscate the purpose of the two.

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kmfrk
Infographics aren't broken. It's just that people think that they are
explaining something by putting it into a graphic. It's like the 10s
equivalent of the PowerPoint craze - bullet point all the sentences!

There is information, and there is explanation. One rarely follows from the
other.

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blt
The problem isn't bad design like this author thinks. The problem is that
designers use infographics to display information that doesn't have enough
data points or dimensions to require plotting. Most of the time, infographics
only express a few sentences' worth of information.

