Categories
Infographics

Infographics and Data Visualization

Types of Infographics

Since their inception in the late 1700’s, infographics have proven themselves to be invaluable tools for neatly visualizing data and presenting it to the public at large. These early graphics mainly focused on topics relating to business, such as with the case of the first recorded infographic which related wheat prices to labor wages, or geographic information. Some examples of these graphics can be found by following this link to Atlas Obscura. As the field of data visualization has grown and infographics have become more complex, encompassing a much wider variety of topics, several infographic archetypes have been created.

  1. The Timeline
Timeline infographics are best used for displaying the evolution of a certain topic/data set over time.

2. Data Visualizations

Data Visualizations are artistic ways of presenting a wide variety of data sets to an audience in such a way that they are easy to interact with, allowing the audience to better understand and remember the presented dat.

3. The Comparison

Comparison infographics are used to highlight similarities and differences between sets of data or particular topics, such as mountains in the example shown above.

4. The Geographic

Geographic infographic are focused on displaying data sets that can be related to geographic information, such as population densities or economic output of certain regions.

5. The List/Visualized Article

This type of infographic serves to summarize an otherwise lengthy article and distill its finer points into a list of short blurbs. Care must be taken to make sure that the important messages of the original source are properly translated into the graphic.

6. The Statistical

Statistical infographics serve to consolidate statistical data sets into a graphical image in much the same way as data visualizations. The key difference between the two is that statistical infographics are focused more on the presentation of hard numbers rather artistic designs. Anyone who has worked with data management programs like Excel should be familiar with the most basic of statistical infographics, such as pie charts and line graphs.

7. The Process

Process infographics display the order i which events tend to occur regarding a specific topic, such as with how laws are passed in the example given above. These graphics are separated from timelines due to the fact that the progression of time is not a necessity for the creation of a process infographic, as it relies only on the order of events and not on when the events occur.

Tools to Help Create Infographics

Creating organized and eye-catching infographics from scratch can be a difficult task. For this reason, I have put together a list of sites and resources that make creating infographics a breeze.

  • Canva.com – allows limited creation of infographics with a free account
  • Easely.ly – alternative to Canva and also free
  • Venngage.com – similar to Canva and Easely, but with a more limited scope for free student accounts
  • Adobe Spark – Spark allows full access to college students and provides a wide range of graphic styles and tools

These are just a few examples out there that greatly simplify the process of creating infographics. There are other sites that offer similar services, but these are usually limited in scope with a free account. In terms of generating simple charts and other quick data visualizations, Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are the best choices available to you.

Interesting Data Sets

I am a Sustainability major who is concentrating in Energy, so I am very interested in all things related to energy efficiency and generation. I managed to pull together a few different sets of data relevant to the field of Sustainability which you can find below.

One reply on “Infographics and Data Visualization”

Hey, I appreciate your post because you went out of your way to present types of infographics, tools to help create them, and data sets that can be used to create infographics. I believe we could have just chosen one bullet point to do but you presented us with more. The photos you provided for the types of infographics would help people understand the type of infographic better because they’re getting the written explanation but also a visual. I also enjoyed how you researched the data sets, with a topic of your interest in energy efficiency and generation. It probably made your assignment easier and more interesting to do.

Comments are closed.