Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

We continue our special posts with the best data viz related content of the year, with a useful list of new tools and resources that were made available throughout 2014. A pretty straightforward compilation that was much harder to produce than initially expected, we must say, since the number of mentions to include was way beyond our initial (poorly made) estimates. So many new options out there!

So, we had a hard time gathering 20 of those new platforms, tools and resources – if you’re a frequent reader of our weekly Data Viz News posts, you’ll might recall several of the mentions in this list, -, and we deliberately left out the new releases, versions and updates of existing tools, such as CartoDB, Mapbox, Tableau, D3.js, RAW, Infogr.am and others.

Of course, there’s always Visualising Data’s list of 250+ tools and resources for a much broader view of what’s available out there.

“If I read news without dataviz I get a bit nauseous, I don’t have patience for words alone anymore. Nor infographics”. This helps explain why marketing expert and consultant León Markovitz co-founded Dadaviz, nicknamed by some as “the YouTube of data visualizations“. Online since June 11th, it’s a collection of the best dataviz selected from different sources by an invite-only community.

Want to learn the Who’s Who of political relationships in the Middle East, what’s the average commute time in the U.S. or where do the visitors of the Oktoberfest come from? This is the place to go.

Most of the published material is “curated” from external sources (the Middle East dataviz was taken from the Economist), but there’s also a certain amount of original work. Every visualization shared on Dadaviz links to the author, original link and data source, when available, so people can find out more and get more context if they wish. If someone wants to use a dataviz, they can reach directly the creators, or type “/embed” at the end of any Dadaviz link -which gives them an embed of the image with all the attribution already in place. Or they can simply share it on social media....

Given the popularity and effectiveness of visual content for marketing, it's no surprise that today's marketers are creating more and more infographics. They're a more enjoyable way of digesting statistics, data sets, and timelines, and they can drive more traffic and engagement than plain text.

Even though there are a lot of good infographics out there, there are still a ton of bad infographics out there, too. You usually know one when you see one: Either it's jam-packed with information, or it hardly shows any useful information at all. Sometimes it's loud with clashing colors; other times, it's plain and boring.

But "knowing it when you see it" doesn't help you prevent from making a bad infographic. Here to dissect what a bad infographic looks like is an infographic from Vertical Measures. Check it out below.