Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The following infographic, created by Zhenia Vasiliev, breaks down the basics of data visualization. It shows how beginners can merge form and function, and design meaningful infographics.

Key highlights:

-  Analyse your data: Analysis is the key. Before we can visualize the data we need to understand it.

-  Come up with a story: Story is finding a single strand of meaning in an endless sea of information. It has a beginning, middle and end.

-  Make it visible: Visualization is a creative act of making. Making the data visually elegant evident and engaging.

-  Entertain to educate: Good data design need to illuminate and inform the viewer, elucidate and illustrate the facts and stats....

"More isn't always better: no more in information design than in poetry..."

Nate Silver, the author of The Signal and the Noise, considers the two factors that make an infographic compelling — providing a window into its creator’s mind and telling a story that “couldn’t be told in any other way.”

He writes:

Design has traditionally been seen as a field for “right-brained” types: those who think visually and spatially rather than with symbols like words and numbers. But modern information design is equal parts art and science, form and function, architecture and engineering. It combines the best of at least three fields of achievement: aesthetics, technology, and journalism.

By aesthetics, I mean all the usual things, but especially proportionality. For information designers, this quality is not so abstract as it might be in other mediums. Their goal is tangible: to convey as much information as possible given some set of constraints....