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?
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?