

Easel.ly - A nice HTML 5 infographics editor - no_gravity
http://www.easel.ly

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wisty
I honestly can't stand the popularity of info-graphics. In UX terms, most of
them are just "painting the corpse" - pretty portrayals of fairly meaningless
numbers. It's rare to have any kind of context to them (comparisons, time
histories, etc), the information per pixel is often infinitesimal.

Still, they are popular for a reason - people know numbers are important, but
will only look at them if they are nice and colorful. I guess I really just
wish more people would look at tables, or simple line graphs; or read articles
with a few numbers in them.

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enjalot
Why do you wish that people would change their consuming behavior and not
their producing behavior? I think it makes more sense to improve the
tools/standards for infographic creation (as you mentioned, there is value
there) than it does to ask everybody to become a better consumer.

In any case, I feel like these kinds of reactions happen with the advent of
every new communications "technology." When the masses get some new tool in
their hand they overwhelmingly produce a bunch of shit. After the dust settles
some small percentage of those people rise to the top by creating quality
which is then happily consumed by everyone.

For me the best example is looking at the historical reactions to the printing
press. At that time the only books were hand scribed by monks and they were
all religious texts of high quality. When the printing press came out many
people were upset that books would ruin education for everyone because so much
crap would be printed. We all know how that turned out: a lot of crap WAS
printed, but tell me the printing press was a bad idea. Now I'm not saying
infographics are the next book, but they are a new communication medium.

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wisty
> Why do you wish that people would change their consuming behavior and not
> their producing behavior?

Because it's a wish, and it's OK to wish for impossible things.

You're right - it's not an ideal world, and an imperfect solution is better
than nothing. People need to know more facts, so they can contextualise new
facts. Infographics (even bad ones) can help there. And good infographics do
exist (though they can be rare).

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epaga
Big no-no: At login, you just sent me my password in clear text via email. You
should never, ever be able to retrieve my clear text password, even just in
order to send it to me.

<http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/>

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5vforest
If they sent it to you at signup, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're
storing it without encryption.

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deelowe
The only time a server should see a password is when it's generating or
comparing against the salted hash using something like bcrypt. There should
never be a way for a server to retrieve the plain text password. Ever.

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andos
I really need something like this. However, I watched the video and came back
unconvinced. You don't show me how to manipulate data. How do I get it into
the canvas? Can I get it from APIs? from Google Docs? Can I bind data to
attributes of the objects I drag and drop into the canvas? Can I filter and
aggregate my data or must I preprocess it offline? We really need a web app
that brings infovis to the masses — like a Garageband-ified Tableau. There's
nothing like that yet. But if you are just a themed clipart canvas, you'll
find a formidable competitor in PowerPoint.

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sigkill
In the introduction part of the video, I expected to be shown how to add and
manipulate data. We also don't know if you can pull real-time statistics or is
this going to be just a pretty front end for CSV/Excel sheets.

Your point about Powerpoint is spot on. And the bonus there is you can
directly cut-paste graphs from Excel into it with the least amount of hassle.

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jqueryin
This is all intended to be constructive, I really like where you're going.

I signed up and began skimming around. Not sure if you're just overloaded with
traffic or if your lightboxes are having a hard time loading, but I can't
preview any of the themes at the moment. Half of the time the lightbox
preloader isn't going away.

Also, please consider adding more hotkey bindings for things. I really would
prefer using my mouse as little as possible. I was trying to delete elements
only to find that the delete hotkey doesn't work.

Also, as mentioned by adityar, I'm not sure what to do with your charts
section. I can't see how the data can be manipulated, if at all.

Lastly, your objects paginator isn't paginating for me. I click on another
page, watch the increment, but the icons don't change.

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program
Put on:

1) support for characters outside ASCII (at least latin1, accented letters do
appear as a space)

2) better copy/paste. Right now it has problems (FF12)

3) Custom page size

and it will be an excellent tool. Keep up the good work.

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hajrice
Love the idea...but why do you think someone would rather use this than just
download a PSD with a lot of elements ?

I think the real value you could be creating is if you're able to get tons of
designers giving you their 'infographic themes' for cheap, and then charging
for access for the app. However, you'd have to make it more 'general', a lot
of the themes seem to be very specific, for example, one is for some kind of
data around the US demographics;

~~~
muyuu
I'm not going to spend a fortune in Photoshop.

However if someone provided me of a piece of software to this effect
(producing output in open formats) then I'd be all over it. Where is this
software?

~~~
Produce
<http://www.gimp.org/>

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muyuu
Lulz I've been using Gimp for 10+ years. Where are the tools to make
infographics like in the video?

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Produce
The standard tools, I guess - it's just an image like any other. Maybe vector
based graphics apps are better suited for this, like InkScape.

~~~
muyuu
Yep, I can also generate SVG with a script. LMAO you said enough.

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gawker
Question for ya: Did you design the themes mostly yourself?

Personally, I feel like that if all infographics were the same, it would loses
its appeal. The purpose of an infographic is to display information visually
and grab attention at the same time. It's a step up from the typical graph.
That said, getting designers to design new themes and providing them a cut
might be an interesting way to monetize.

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NathanKP
I hate to be the grammar nazi but:

"When your ready export your infographic."

That should be:

"When you're ready export your infographic."

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danso
No, that's not being a grammar nazi...this would be:

"When you're ready, export your infographic"

(and that arguably isn't...commas are important)

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wavephorm
You forgot the peroid.

~~~
croddin
Did you mean: period?

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sao
Like the idea - as someone who regularly needs to put together shiny views of
rather mundane data, I'd say it's less about the "infographic" (i.e. design
elements) and more about having useful data views that convey the meaning
represented by the data. So - there's a design challenge for you... come up
with templates that aren't just "themes" but rather communicate an idea.

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talmand
I'd be curious as to what problems they are having with IE to not support it.
When I get in there it complains about me using IE but I can edit the objects
they provide much the same as any other browser they do support. It's just the
UI bar is not showing so I cannot create new objects.

It's just curiosity really, what's the technical hurdle in this case for IE?

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joshmlewis
I understand where you're coming from, but as a side note, I love how everyone
is now for IE. It's quite ironic. I almost did this myself yesterday when I
saw someone didn't support IE. I wonder how far this trend will go?

~~~
jvm
Nowadays with IE10 almost here and IE9 half-decent itself, failure to support
IE is sort of a signal of unprofessionalism, since it usually takes a modicum
of effort to support it. Personally I design sites first in Firefox, then
extend support, and I find Webkit browsers are often more broken than IE.

~~~
talmand
Can you give examples of what you find broken in Webkit but not in IE? Are you
speaking more of HTML/CSS or JS development? More for my notes of stuff to
look for.

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dandelany
I'm sure this is still a work in progress, but the charts feature doesn't
really do anything at the moment, it just sticks a chart-looking image into
the infographic.

Honestly, like many people, I'm more than a little annoyed at the popularity
of low-information-density infographics. That said, I like the idea behind
this project, as a tool like this could definitely encourage people to create
better, richer infographics with more interesting data. However, if this is to
be the case, the "chart" module should be the _first_ module that you get
working correctly - charts are THE most important part of infographics,
everything else is just fluff. The fact that the most important feature is
currently just a placeholder does not bode well for this project.

I will stay optimistic about the future of this tool, but call me when you get
charts working, until then it's basically just a drag and drop design toy.

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justindocanto
Sounds awesome but here's my 2 cents/2 suggestions

1) you're creating a html5 app but you cant disable the buttons on your
slider? you only have 1 slide so disable the arrows

2) you need some sort of demo of what the finished product looks like. doesn't
have to be editable... just show me what it makes.

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taskstrike
I saw a lot of these infographics on graphic river.
[http://graphicriver.net/item/elements-of-infographics-
with-a...](http://graphicriver.net/item/elements-of-infographics-with-a-map-
of-the-world/798774)

I hope you paid the correct license for these things.

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adityar
The overall UX is very good. I could not figure out how to modify the graph
data (assuming I can).

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elliottkember
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it seems like a pretty cool way
of building these things. On the other hand, I feel as though putting tools
like this in everybody's hands just leads to shitty visualisations.

Data visualisation is a bit of a science, and using it incorrectly can be
hugely misleading. This is like saying "here, you can create professional-
looking presentations with this new product called PowerPoint."

I don't want to put down the work that's gone into this app, because it looks
great. I'm just annoyed with the number of shitty infographics that get
churned out by people with no data visualisation experience.

~~~
crjn
Data visualization is a deep science and tightly related to business
intelligence. It always start with data. You first list them as a simple table
(raw data) and then you decide how best to show it to the world. So you start
aggregating, clustering, ranking etc to refine the data and come to
conclusions yourself.

Once you come to conclusion, you keep rethinking and validating that these are
the right conclusions and once confirmed the next challenge is how to
articulate your conclusions to the world.

You then go to your designer and give enough information to be translated to
infographics/dashboard. You see it is a very involved process.

I always think my data can be easily converted to a bar chart, line or pie
chart. Rest all are variations of the same. If you have a third dimension then
you go to bubble or scatter charts. So visualization without data is just a
wireframe

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Jacobi
The idea is quite good, but I can't even change the color (a message box
indicates that this feature is coming soon !). This isn't beta software. I
expect from a beta version that all the important features are done.

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neilharris
Hey guys, this is Neil from easel.ly. Firstly we're really enthused by all the
responses. We are very early beta and currently could not be more
bootstrapped. We appreciate the feedback and are working feverishly to fix
many issues we have. We were not aware of the plain text password being sent
out. My apologies and this has been fixed.

Thanks for all the great feedback.

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laconian
85% (big pie colorful pie chart showing 85%) of people don't like
infographics. 40% (big pie chart of 40%) of infographics are false. 75% of
people don't care that these pie charts add up past 100%. 100% of those people
just want to see their biases confirmed by colorful pseudoscience and bogus
statistics.

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Lambent_Cactus
I get that you're going for a mashup of "Easel" and "Easily" as in "Easily
create Infographics!" The spelling, however, makes my mind go first to
"Weaselly", which I imagine is not the association you want to create.

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robert00700
Some keyboard shortcuts would be fantastic (Especially delete!)

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adam890106
What tools are they used, or what kind of tools do you recommend to build
html5 apps like things? (js libraries, frameworks etc)

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fallenhitokiri
do you plan adding an option to delete an account?

hitting "update profile" (tried to change my password) results in an empty
page with just your header. (still pointing to profile.php)

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sgt101
I loved this, I was productive in minutes.

Fab. Thank you.

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zobzu
Somehow this is quite slow in FF (its fast in Chrome)

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ChrisArchitect
easel.ly - great name.

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hk_kh
What are the benefits of using [this] vs, let's say, a free svg editor like
Inkscape?

You could argue that Inkscape is just a svg program, while this site is "easy"
to use.

And yet, it seems to me a couple of svgs with palettes and objects, maybe some
reference fonts and a bunch of tutorials on what are the key points of an
infographic would suit a better purpose.

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adventureful
Small suggestion: add information to your html title. I often bookmark
services to come back to when I have more time, and the title merely says
"easel.ly" - which is non-descriptive. I customized a description on my end of
course, but the point being, it might help users if you put into the title
what easel.ly is / does.

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tubbo
lol I love the "charts" feature, because charts don't actually matter or
something as long as they look like they're going up over time people will buy
it

