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.

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?

There is a very good series of posts by Andrew Gelman (a statistician at Columbia) on the tension between statistical graphics (eminently clear at the risk of being boring) and information visualizations (captivating, colorful, and novel, but obscuring the data):

http://andrewgelman.com/2011/08/infovis-and-statgraphics-upd...

Professionally I do projects on the former side of the spectrum, but as with any design you just need to know the audience and how you want them to use the graphic---to grab their attention and interest, or to catalyze insight about a data set.

First of all, definitely second the recommendation for "Visualizing Data"... recently had to track down my copy from someone who borrowed it.

Also, while I agree that most "infographics" are generally useless and belong on USA Today (where I will never have to see them), there are some uses. I find a captivating "infographic" can be a good introduction when presenting information, sort of as an overview. A clever and small "infographic" can get people interested and help provide some context for the hard data coming up. I have a similar rule with pie charts: I only use them at the very beginning of presenting a topic in order to provide some context and ease the audience in. Once I'm past the first few slides and I avoid them like the plague.

IF you're making an infographic to help your average consumer facing business, the purpose is to get links and traffic, not to share information. The average person doesn't care how accurate information is or how it is projected - but they do care how interesting it looks and how shocking the facts are.

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)

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.

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.

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

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/

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.

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'?

This Comment Is Criticizing The Title Of This Post