design

Source: Indexed

Who doesn’t love a good infographic?

When done well, they concisely present information in a way no narrative story could, helping you see comparison and draw conclusions you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint on your own. But when they’re done poorly, or worse unnecessarily, they muddle information for the sake of being an infographic.

The goal of a designer is to make information more accessible and readable, whether it’s by choosing the perfect font to convey a mood, layout to draw readers through, or graph to show off data as only graphs can do. But when unprecedented amounts of data and graphics software fall into the hands of the masses, color and quantity sometimes trump care and quality.

Grace Dobush at HOW Interactive Design is on a campaign to stop the madness. In her post, Quit it With All the Infographics Already, she points out several good reasons to think before inking an infographic, including:

 
• Most infographics aren’t accessible for the visually impaired.
• Most infographics aren’t search-engine optimized.
• Those super-long infographics are practically useless on a mobile device.
• Of all online infographics, 89% contain statistics of dubious veracity. (Err, percentage is madeup, which is sort of her point.)
• Many infographics are just plain bad.

That’s not to say there aren’t reasons to use graphics. There are plenty of awesome graphical stories on news sites and blogs today. 10,000 Words highlights them often. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you need to go graphic goofy.

You should go read the rest of the post to get more background on those valid points, and to get HOW Magazine’s pointers on how to avoid falling into the infographic trap and responsibly create them.

(The image on this post, by the way, comes from Indexed, a comic of sorts drawn on index cards and using only charts. I’m not saying the charts are bad, but I’ll admit I’ve scratched my head in confusion at a few of them.)

With the rise of new media platforms like tablets and smart phones, the ways in which we interact with content have shifted dramatically. In a nod to the ever-growing amount of readers using tablet and mobile devices to read the news, the BBC launched a beta site redesign today that accounts for “swipability,” the finger gesture most popular for navigation on smart phones and tablets. “The beta provides a first glimpse of core design principles that will underpin the reshaped BBC Online,” said the BBC in a press release today, “which take into account changing user behaviours including the preference for ‘swiping’ through content – increasingly intuitive given the rise of touch-screen smart phones and tablets.”

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I’m not even going to pretend to be objective in this post — I am absolutely in love with the new BostonGlobe.com. The site, which launched today, is a whole new online brand for The Boston Globe, whose content formerly only existed on the all-encompassing Boston.com.

But it’s not just the design that I’m in love with. I’m in love with the idea of starting fresh — no rules, no old elements to retain — just a brand new site with a clean slate. And The Globe didn’t hold back; they’ve rethought how news should be presented in a way that no other major news organization has had the opportunity to do.

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On Sunday evening, The New York Times released beta620, a website showcasing experimental projects that the paper is working on.

It’s a playground, in that development versions of the seven initial projects featured there are functional. Feedback and suggestions are being actively solicited from the public. Many of the projects on beta620 won’t see the light of day on the NYTimes.com production site. But some will “graduate” (Google Labs-style) and become features of the main site. Read more

Infographics and interactive features are quickly becoming one of the most innovative ways to share and display datasets. Data visualizations are the perfect complement to text-heavy articles, and can make great explainers for readers hoping to learn quickly about a complicated issue or story. By translating complicated datasets into beautiful graphics, complex ideas can be communicated in a clear, easy to understand way. A new start-up is helping to aggregate these visualizations into one place, creating a one stop shop for interesting infographics.

Visual.ly lets you explore and share compelling data visualizations built by designers across the web. The site, started by Stewart Langille and Lee Sherman, originally from Mint.com’s content and marketing team, culls the best visualizations by the best designers and lays them out neatly for users to reference, share and explore. Aside from helping interested readers understand complex issues, the site also helps designers promote their own data projects. Designers can create their own profiles on Visual.ly which serve as portfolios for their work.

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