Smashing Magazine has a extensive sampling of infographics in their article Data visualization: modern approaches. If you’re looking for ideas for visual content, something should catch your attention here and may inspire your design.
I don’t have any references at hand, but it’s pretty safe to say that human beings are for the most part highly visually-stimulated, whether they realize it or not. So presenting information in new, interesting ways will always be more captivating than a boring old table or chart. Data visualization techniques offer you many choices.
You don’t have to get as complex as some of the examples in the Smashing article, but even a slight variation on a traditional presentation can make an impact. In fact, visual texture can be added purely from a simple construct such as a tag cloud - which shows variation of font sizes.
Two variations on the same information are shown at Ohmpage (at the time of this writing). One is a traditional tag cloud labelled “Content Folksonomy” at the bottom of the homepage. The second version is the tag chart (my name for it) in the navigation column labelled “Content Taxonomy”.
If I don’t miss my guess, these both represent the exact same information: the number of posts on that site tagged with a given category. The category with the most posts is “design” (75).
With the tag cloud, increased quantity is represented proportionally by increased font size for a category. With the tag chart, increased quantity is represented using a wider rectangle. So “design” has the largest font size, and the widest rectangle.
Both types of infographics add visual texture and are relatively easy to produce. Whether they’re effective or not depends on the reason they’re included.
Leave a Reply