Infographic Design

Being in visual communications design, I often get lost in the world of “ah – that’s so pretty”, which is fine, I guess (it’s a nice way to experience life), but I often forget that visuals, “graphics,” sometimes exist to tell stories that otherwise have a hard time telling themselves.

Like number stories. We hear expressions like “the numbers tell an interesting story” or “listen to the numbers”. The funny thing is, the numbers really don’t – people do, people who know what the numbers mean and are able to synthesize that meaning into something understandable, maybe even inspiring. For those intrepid graphic designers, it might be a regular thing to hover on past the Photoshop icon and click that big green “X” instead (uh, or Open Office Calc of course). Bar graphs and pie charts may not be your thing, but when a good designer takes that story back into the land of visual aesthetics and communication, the results can be wondrous.

One chunk of numbered data that is rich with story potential is the data of the Internet. Clicks, traffic, servers, pings, things we never really see. Yet we feel like we know what’s going on – we have Facebook friends, we’ve “tweeted” (or have friends who do), we’ve heard of a blog, etc. But is that the whole story?

Over at Six Revisions, there is a really nice example of graphics that tell this story better the numbers do themselves: 10 Revealing infographics about the web. Apart from being intensely interesting, it’s also a great showcase of successful graphical story telling. I found myself mesmerized by the overlay of Internet Property Success over the Tokyo subway system. And by staring at this incredibly rich graphic, I learned that YouTube has significantly more traffic, and has a slightly more stable web business platform, than Facebook. I was also interested to see that Drupal (the software running the Opus website) was categorized under the “Publishing” and “Creativity” subway lines.

In the end, I was surprised to find that I stared at this graphic for about twenty minutes. My fellow Opusoids tell me that I emitted more than a few “this is so cool!”-s along the way. Well, it is cool – cool when a graphic can tell you such a large and rich story, when it keeps you coming back.

And, after all, it was pretty too.