Author: mitch151

WHAT IS AN INFOGRAPHIC?

Infographics are an amazing way of being able to visualize and communicate information to people in a couple of fun images and visuals. They are great marketing tools and they will take the attention of your audience much quicker than a simple power point. With an infographic comes pictures, graphs, data-based visualizations and a very minimal amount of text that sums up the point you are trying to get across. It is also very important to know and to be as clear as possible so that your audience can understand what you are trying to show them.

SHOW MORE, TELL LESS

I think that it is best to show your audience your information instead of telling them. In other words, put in a data-based visual like a graph or a pie chart and show them how the numbers corelate with your given topic. Amy Balliet suggested in Smashing magazine, “Every once in a while, turn off the text layer and see whether the infographic still makes sense. If there isn’t any data viz, or if a bunch of pictures are missing context, then you are doing too much telling and not enough showing.” If you are able to remove a piece of text from your infographic, and your visuals make sense on their own you are on the path of having an effective end product. 

THE PRESENTATION OF YOUR INFOGRAPHIC

From viewing many different kinds of infographics most of them are created vertically rather than horizontally. With that downward-like layout, you should have clear transitions. Having good transitions both on your infographic as well as when you are presenting gives your audience a brief moment to let them know that you are going on to something else. Good transitions in your presentations also help your audience see the connection and relationship between one idea to the next. 

Reference: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/the-dos-and-donts-of-infographic-design/

Vizhealth is a unique way of creating a certain style of data visualizations for healthcare and health data. With that, it is also a great source to help anyone that learning about data visualizations in any job. I had a very pleasant experience going through the website and I loved how everything was organized on the pages. The neatness and amount of information throughout the entire website caught my attention.

The Wizard, being one of my favorite tools that I explored, is a helpful way for healthcare providers to focus on how they would like to present their data to a patient or boss. The Wizard tries to analyze your goal and then gives you many results to choose from.

I noticed that Vizhealth has a lot of different links and hyperlinks that point to other web pages, web sites, graphics, visuals, files and even e-mail addresses. The ones that I came across definitely helped me understand certain data and words that I was not familiar with. The colors that were used throughout the website as well were also appealing. The colors blended together and there were just enough.

Visuals

Vizhealth also had an entire page about how they choose their visuals to go onto their site, giving a brief description of their process. I think that this is something good to have on a website like this one so viewers can see how each visualization is picked to be shown.

I think that I would recommend this website for someone who is learning about data visualizations because it gives great resources as well as helpful tips to guide you in the right direction of analyzing your numbers. My overall experience was a good one and I continued to learn new things.