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SXSW Interactive Part 6: Interactive Infographics

Posted on: Apr. 6, 2010  |  By: Lisa Holmes  |  Category: Graphic Design
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Session attended: Interactive Infographics
Twitter hashtag: #interinfo

Interactive infographics, which are graphical depictions of data, allow you to process what would have taken hours to understand into seconds. In this session, four panelists showed examples of infographics and then talked about the current state of technologies related to creating them.

NOTES FROM THE SESSION:

  • Effective visualization is not about trying to tell a story around the data. It’s about allowing the data to tell it’s story.
  • Don’t start with the data or you’ll end up with something that looks like data, start with the question or the problem.
  • As mobile devices become predominant devices for viewing online content, technologies will need to change. For example, Flash is the most-used tool for creating interactive infographics, yet is not supported on the iPhone or iPad. HTML 5 and Canvas open the possibility of not requiring a plug-in to view, but as I discussed in an earlier post, full cross browser support is not yet available for these newer technologies.

SAMPLE INFOGRAPHICS:

Good, which produces a website, magazine, videos and events and is “for people who give a damn”, is a rich resource for excellent infographics. Casey Caplowe, Good’s founder and creative director, showed several examples of infographics, many of which are static graphics and not interactive, and are frequently about educating people to make change for good.

Ben Fry’s example of Darwin’s Origin of Species shows all of the revisions that were made to the original document in an animated and interactive format.

Shan Carter, from the New York Times, produces highly interactive infographics that utilize user-controls to show the data based on different variables.

Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen showed an example of visualizing real time Twitter activity related to the Olympics using photos as graphic elements that scale in size based on the frequency of the words associated with the photos.

More samples of infographics:

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