
This Man Can Teach You To Make Your Own Stunning Infographics - edw519
http://www.slate.com/id/2301425/
======
jaysonelliot
The goal of information design and visualization is not "stunning
infographics," it's finding ways to visualize data and make it more viscerally
understandable.

Ben Fry is an amazingly talented information designer, and his book
Visualizing Data is a must-read for anyone interested in the field.

Sadly, most of the "infographics" craze right now is focused on being
"stunning" rather than being informative. Graphic designers run amok, creating
beautiful (or at least cutesy) images that fail to clarify, or worse, confuse
with inaccurate scales, inappropriate juxtapositions, or sins of omission.

Data visualization can be elegant and informative. "Infographics" usually live
somewhere on the pages of USA Today or GOOD magazine.

~~~
JoelSutherland
I partially disagree. I think the goal of information design and visualization
is to communicate information.

Communication cannot happen if viewers don't care enough to look at the
visualization or are intimidated by it. Some fuzzy math has to be done to
optimize for several factors: attention capturing, attention holding,
understandability, information density, etc. A good infographic communicates
the most, most important information to the most people.

I HATE the current link-bait infographic trend as much as the next HNer, but
sometimes I wonder if I am being a bit snobbish. If a low density
visualization reaches and captivates an order of magnitude more people than a
dense yet well understandable one, which has done a better job?

------
eegilbert
Most of you know how to code, and so you might be turned off by the easy style
of Ben Fry's Processing (<http://processing.org>). However, even as an
advanced programmer I often turn to it to prototype visual ideas. After 10 bad
ideas (discarded quickly), one comes out right--then I port to straight Java,
Scala or ActionScript.

(John Resig also ported Processing to Javascript: <http://processingjs.org>)

~~~
meric
Processing was the first thing I learned after Basic back when I was a kid and
wanted to make my own RTS. Good times, good times.

~~~
int3
Wow, I had no idea that Processing has been around for so long -- I'd only
heard about it sometime in the last two years.

~~~
meric
This was 2006-2007. Not too long ago...

------
viggity
Ben Fry is amazing. I've done a lot of info-viz work and his PhD Dissertation
was incredibly helpful. He is much much easier to read and comprehend compared
to Tufte.

I highly recommend it: <http://benfry.com/phd/>

~~~
joelhooks
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks Tufte is on the difficult spectrum
of reading and understanding. Thanks for the link. I've not seen this, and it
is the kind of info I was hoping for when I clicked through to the article.

------
sadlyNess
Question: can't design-impaired programmers think visually(as article
suggests)? I thought that being able to 'see' how a collection of code is
supposed to work is thinking visually. Does visual has more to it than 'can-
made-to-be-seen-with-eyes'?

------
belligerent
This Comment Is Criticizing The Title Of This Post

