

The Boom of Big Infographics - wherespaul
http://flowingdata.com/2010/05/06/the-boom-of-big-infographics/

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wmeredith
Uh, Wade Meredith here. That second infographic is mine. It was the most
successful blog post on Healthbolt.net (my blog at the time, I ended up
selling it to b5media a few months later). I had a couple of other big hits,
but this was my favorite.

I'm glad they remark in the OP about the post taking on a life of it's own. It
has 4k+ comments and has turned into an informal support group for people to
share stories about quitting successes and failures.

It's pretty much the first big graphic design project I ever undertook (I had
built a Wordpress blog and was reskinning it every month or two to teach
myself how to code, so I thought should start getting serious about design as
well). It was by far the most rewarding post I made on that blog out of about
400 over the course of 9 months. I think it's helped a lot of people and I'm
glad it seems like it's going to help more in the future.

The actual post finally ended up here with an add-on article tacked onto the
front of it ([http://blisstree.com/feel/what-happens-to-your-body-if-
you-s...](http://blisstree.com/feel/what-happens-to-your-body-if-you-stop-
smoking-right-now/))

While the content changed hands a few more times over the last 3 years
apparently on of them involved the first ~400 posts on the blog, which I
wrote, getting attributed to "Liz Lewis". (Disappointing.) Considering I sold
the blog and the content with it, though, there's nothing to be done about it.
Such is life.

The important thing is that the post itself, originally published in 2007, now
has 4,239 comments and the last one was left 20 hours ago. Pretty cool stuff.

TL;DR I made the "most popular" infographic of 2007 while I was still wet-
behind-the-ears as a designer, and it's cool to see it leading a life of its
own 3 years later.

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hugh3
Nice work. It doesn't suffer from the problems of many of the other
infographics, since it's not claiming to be some kind of unbiased presentation
of data; rather it's an unashamed advertisement for the idea that you should
quit smoking.

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hugh3
I read this entire article.

When I got to the end I realised I actually _hadn't_ read this article. I'd
just looked at the pictures and felt like I'd read an article anyway.

I went back to actually read the article but the ten-point text next to the
90-point text made the 90-point text far too mesmerising.

This may, perhaps, explain some of the appeal of giant infographics.

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jacquesm
Info graphics irritate me, they dumb down what is already trivial to digest.
I'm sure it fits right in with 'talking points', 'power points','infomercials'
and 'advertorials' but it isn't for me.

I prefer to read some solid text, graphics optional, if they have to be there
to illustrate the points in the text then so be it.

People are lazy, and infographics seem to tap in to that so I don't doubt
they'll be successful, but it is just another step on the road to idiocracy.
Keep those gray cells working, use them or lose them.

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jgrahamc
Someone ought to write about the scourge of infographics.

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joubert
they pretend to convey unbiased information

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jaybol
I understand that images and visual representations are powerful, and impact
more people in large part because they require less in terms of
time/attention, so they have the power to mislead. But to label all
infographics as a scourge and as automatically biased is quite a
generalization. For that matter, how do they claim to be unbiased in the first
place? Data and studies are spun towards researcher bias at times regardless
of the end format. To disregard infographics or despise them versus black and
white text and Excel tables doesn't make sense. It is a medium, and a powerful
medium at that, but so is text, photography and videos, and they can all be
used to objective ends or subjective ends, and none is ever pure and holy or
automatically accurate (nor are Excel tables and the raw data used to inform
the stylized infographics).

~~~
joubert
Text may be black and white physically, but can express a wider range of
nuance.

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xtacy
Could anyone point me to some source of good vector graphics "clipart"? The
pictures in Infographics are pretty and would be awesome if I could use some
in presentations as well.

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hardik
Can anyone suggest a good app/tricks to make infographics?

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jaybol
Here is a good post if you are looking to get started. There isn't really a
'best' program or a shortcut, just go with what you feel most comfortable with
and start exploring datasets (census, BLS, data.gov, Guardian UK are all good
sources) to get a feel for what is most intuitive.

