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Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

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Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#41

Post by far-I »

pault wrote: post #38
billpatrianakos wrote: post #11

I agree completely but unfortunately I doubt people will do them right until they stop attracting eyeballs. To the well informed, bad info graphics are a plague on the web. To my sister's teenage friends and my mother's circle of friends they're "oh cool, I don't have to read!". Self respecting graphic designers won't create these awful "info graphics" but anyone who's looking to attract some eyeballs in the hopes of…

Self respecting graphic designers won't create these awful "info graphics" Disagree! Kelli Anderson is a fantastic designer and makes all kinds of infographics (although I imagine they cost a lot more than $200): http://www.kellianderson.com/projects/infographics.html

they're nice but hard to read. It seems like the data is not a priority.

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#42

Post by tokenadult »

korzon wrote: post #12

For actual depth and substance regarding information visualization, you should just read Tufte, since much of this article is obviously informed by it: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

Tufte's site includes this analysis of a good example of an infographic:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#43

Post by EvilTerran »

hoopism wrote: post #13
melchior wrote: post #8

As a designer I'd like to thank you for this post. This recent fad of "infographics" (some text in rectangles + pie chart) is quite sad. These things are information graphics about as much as fake lens flares were graphic design in the 90s. Side note: are you serious about people paying for this?

Well said. I contribute to a site that does a lot of interactive visualizations and works with artists that do more static infographics. Because we display them time to time we get massive amounts of email from companies that paid to have an infographic made (usual on a subject not related to their biz) and slap ads on the bottom. I've never posted one and can't for the life of me figure out why any legit business (m…

can't for the life of me figure out why any legit business (maybe that's my answer) would do that

I think they're hoping it'll "go viral". And they pronounce that with the quotes.

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#44

Post by StavrosK »

kevinpet wrote: post #34

Title makes it sound like he's going to delineate the difference between "infographic" and "non-infographic", but it seems to run into the "real Christians" problem where anything he doesn't like "isn't an infographic". Apparently it's categorically impossible for an infographic to be less than fantastic, which is an odd definition of infographic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#45

Post by Karunamon »

juddlyon wrote: post #36
olalonde wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is obviously link bait, SEO content.

I'm not sure that's fair, Ian Laurie has been a solid blogger for years and is often critical of current trends. He ventures into technical topics from time to time too. He may not be your cup of tea but he's certainly not the cheap PR stunt kind of internet marketing guy (I'm not sure you're insinuating that, just wanted to let folks who are interested in web marketing topics that he's worth paying attention to IMO)…

>is often critical of current trends

I'm seeing more and more of this kind of article on HN recently. Solid blogger or not, if I had a penny for every "$current_trend sucks" screed posted here and frontpaged, I'd be retiring by now.

Honestly, it gets old hearing people complain about everything under the sun after a while. (And I say this as someone who complains a hell of a lot on his own blog, but then again I've never been posted here..)

Did we really need a breathless blog article to tell us that some infographics suck? Stop the presses!

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#46

Post by hoopism »

EvilTerran wrote: post #43
hoopism wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. I contribute to a site that does a lot of interactive visualizations and works with artists that do more static infographics. Because we display them time to time we get massive amounts of email from companies that paid to have an infographic made (usual on a subject not related to their biz) and slap ads on the bottom. I've never posted one and can't for the life of me figure out why any legit business (m…

can't for the life of me figure out why any legit business (maybe that's my answer) would do that I think they're hoping it'll "go viral". And they pronounce that with the quotes.

I will say... I've had lots of success with some of the visualization projects I've worked on (TOOT TOOT!)... but none had ads and I had no service to sell... so that makes things a lot less complicated.

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#47

Post by batista »

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #35
batista wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you call trivialities I call attention to detail. Yes, but at some point what each one calls something stops, and they have to face objective reality. Now, if you were talking about bad syntax/grammar/spelling, a blinking grey font over a white background, or something like it, yes, we could count that as "attention to detail". But not reading an article because of a mismatch with the title and it's URL (which…

You kind of lost me when you started telling me that I should consider useless the same things you consider useless. I'm sorry I openly questioned the mismatch. I'm just glad that the OP gave an actual answer... rather than just ridicule me.

>You kind of lost me when you started telling me that I should consider useless the same things you consider useless.

Well, other people sometimes are in the right on telling you to consider useless what they consider useless. For example, if someone tells you to consider "creationism" useless, they would be right. It's not like everything is a matter of personal choice --or that they just say it to impose their arbitrary opinion.

Same here, it's not like anybody else would have found the "url/title mismatch as a reason NOT to read an article" reasonable.

(We've ventured too far off into off-topic land, but what the hell)

>I'm just glad that the OP gave an actual answer... rather than just ridicule me.

And doesn't he being that kind make you regret suggesting people drop his article for a trivial typo?

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#48

Post by DanBC »

fromhet wrote: post #31

Has the quality of links on HN declined the last months?

(http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site.

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#49

Post by lloeki »

tptacek wrote: post #40
kevinpet wrote: post #34

Title makes it sound like he's going to delineate the difference between "infographic" and "non-infographic", but it seems to run into the "real Christians" problem where anything he doesn't like "isn't an infographic". Apparently it's categorically impossible for an infographic to be less than fantastic, which is an odd definition of infographic.

Let's not pretend there's more controversy here than there really is. If anything, the point he's making is too banal. Almost the whole of _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_ argues against the style of visualization this post argues against. Virtually all infographics are indeed terrible visualizations of information.

> Virtually all infographics are indeed terrible visualizations of information.

I do not agree. I've seen quite a bunch that – although obviously not a definitive source of information – give a good sense of perspective. Here's one [0] that came back to mind.

[0] http://mozy.com/blog/misc/how-much-is-a-petabyte/

Re: Your infographic isn't an infographic. It's just a crappy graphic.

#50

Post by Locke1689 »

lloeki wrote: post #49
tptacek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not pretend there's more controversy here than there really is. If anything, the point he's making is too banal. Almost the whole of _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_ argues against the style of visualization this post argues against. Virtually all infographics are indeed terrible visualizations of information.

> Virtually all infographics are indeed terrible visualizations of information. I do not agree. I've seen quite a bunch that – although obviously not a definitive source of information – give a good sense of perspective. Here's one [0] that came back to mind. [0] http://mozy.com/blog/misc/how-much-is-a-petabyte/

Really? Most of that chart is just big text. Big text is not an infographic. I would say the most interesting one I've come across recently is http://xkcd.com/radiation/.
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