Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge to present complex information quickly and clearly. They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends. The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualization, information design, or information architecture.
What is Infographics
A data-rich visualisation of a story or thesis, used as an tool to educate and inform. Also a way to to build brand awareness and inbound links at half the cost of standard online marketing campaigns.
The value of infographics
High quality infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than text articles. 40% of people respond better to visual information than text. Publishers that use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12% more than those who do not use infographics.
Tips to go viral
- Choose an interesting topic and a unique, catchy title
- Include a diversity of sources and statistics
- Promote via social media websites
- Make it easy for readers to engage with your company
- Avoid white backgrounds and don't include too much text
How to measure success
- Measure Search Engine Optimization success by determining the increase i inbounds links using Google Webmaster Tools
- Determine branding success by accessing image file loads of the infographic in your server logs
Infographic popularity growing by the numbers
In March 2012 "#infographic" was tweeted 56,765 times. "infographic" was search on a average 301,000 global monthly searches on Google April 2011-April 2012. Two million blog posts are written every day, think how many of these include infographics.
Information based on : http://www.customermagnetism.com/infographics/what-is-an-infographic/
History of infographics
In 1626, Christoph Scheiner published the Rosa Ursina sive Sol, a book that revealed his research about the rotation of the sun; Infographics appeared in the form of illustrations demonstrating the Sun’s rotation patterns.
In 1790, William Playfair, an engineer and political economist, published the first data graphs in his book The Commercial and Political Atlas. To represent the economy of 18th Century England, Playfair used statistical graphs, bar charts, line graphs and histograms. In his work, Statistical Breviary, he is credited with introducing the first area chart and pie chart.
Around 1820, modern geography was established by Carl Ritter. His maps included shared frames, agreed map legends, scales, repeatability, and fidelity. Such a map can be considered a "supersign" which combines sign systems—as defined by Charles Sanders Peirce—consisting of symbols, icons, indexes as representations. Other examples can be seen in the works of geographers Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt.
In 1857, English nurse Florence Nightingale used information graphics to persuade Queen Victoria to improve conditions in military hospitals. The principal one she used was the Coxcomb chart, a combination of stacked bar and pie charts, depicting the number and causes of deaths during each month of the Crimean War. James Joseph Sylvester introduced the term "graph" in 1878 in the scientific magazine Nature and published a set of diagrams showing the relationship between chemical bonds and mathematical properties. Graph Theory 1736-1936, pp. 65. These were also some of the first mathematical graphs.1861 saw the release of an influential information graphic on the subject of Napoleon's disastrousmarch on Moscow. The graphic’s creator, Charles Joseph Minard, captured four different changing variables that contributed to Napoleon’s downfall in a single two-dimensional image: the army's direction as they traveled, the location the troops passed through, the size of the army as troops died from hunger and wounds, and the freezing temperatures they experienced.
20th century
In 1942 Isidore Isou published the Lettrist manifesto, a document covering art, culture, poetry, film, and political theory. The included works, also called metagraphicsand hypergraphics, are a synthesis of writing and visual art.
In 1958 Stephen Toulmin proposed a graphical argument model, called The Toulmin Model of Argumentation. The diagram contained six interrelated components used for analyzing arguments, and was considered Toulmin’s most influential work, particularly in the field of rhetoric, communication, and computer science. The Toulmin Model of Argumentation became influential in argumentation theory and its applications.
A pioneer in data visualization, Edward Tufte, wrote a series of books - Visual Explanations, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Envisioning Information - on the subject of information graphics.[11][12][13] Referred to byThe New York Times as the “da Vinci of Data”, Tufte began to give day-long lectures and workshops on the subject of infographics starting in 1993. As of 2012, Tufte still gives these lectures.[14] To Tufte, good data visualizations represent every data point accurately and enable a viewer to see trends and patterns in the data. Tufte’s contribution to the field of data visualization and infographics is considered immense, and his design principles can be seen in many websites, magazines, and newspapers today.[15]In 1972 and 1973, respectively, the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft included on their vessels the Pioneer Plaques, a pair of gold-anodized aluminum plaques, each featuring a pictorial message. The pictorial messages included nude male and female figures as well as symbols that were intended to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. The images were designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and were unique in that their graphical meanings were to be understandable to extraterrestrial beings, who would have no conception of human language.
The infographics created by Peter Sullivan for The Sunday Times in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were some of the key factors in encouraging newspapers to use more infographics. Sullivan is also one of the few authors who have written about information graphics in newspapers. Likewise the staff artists at USA Today, the United States newspaper that debuted in 1982, established the goal of using graphics to make information easier to comprehend. However, the paper has received criticism for oversimplifying news stories and for creating infographics that some find emphasize entertainment over content and data. Tufte coined the term chartjunk to refer to graphics that are visually appealing to the point of losing the information contained within them.
With vector graphics and raster graphics becoming ubiquitous in computing in the 21st Century, data visualizations have been applied to commonly used computer systems, including desktop publishing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
Closely related to the field of information graphics is information design, which is the creation of infographics. Author and founder of the TED, Richard Saul Wurman, is considered the originator of the phrase "information architect" and many of his books, such as Information Anxiety, helped propel the phrase "information design" from a concept to a job category.
21st century
By the year 2000, Adobe Flash-based animations on the Internet had made use of many key practices in creating infographics in order to create a variety of products and games.
Likewise, television began to incorporate infographics into the viewers’ experiences in the early 2000s. One example of infographics usage in television and in pop culture is the 2002 music video by the Norwegian musicians of Röyksopp, for their song "Remind Me." The video was composed entirely of animated infographics. Similarly, in 2004, a television commercial for the French energy company Areva used animated infographics as an advertising tactic. Both of these videos and the attention they received have conveyed to other fields the potential value in using information graphics to describe complex information efficiently.
With the rise of alternatives to Adobe Flash, such as HTML 5 and CSS3, infographics are now created in a variety of media with a number of software tools.[17]
The field of journalism has also incorporated and applied information graphics to news stories. For stories that intend to include text, images, and graphics, the system called the maestro concept allows entire newsrooms to collaborate and organize a story to successfully incorporate all components. Across many newsrooms, this teamwork-integrated system is applied to improve time management. The maestro system is designed to improve the presentation of stories for busy readers of media. Many news based websites have also used interactive information graphics in which the user can extract information on a subject as they explore the graphic.
Many businesses use infographics as a tool for communicating with and attracting potential customers.[18] Information graphics have become a tool for internet marketers and companies to create content that others will link to, thus possibly boosting a company's reputation and online presence.[19]
Infographics are finding a home in the classroom as well. Courses that teach students to create their own infographics using a variety of tools may encourage engagement in the classroom and may lead to a better understanding of the concepts they are mapping onto the graphics.[20]
With the popularity of social media, infographics have become popular, often as static images or simple web interfaces, covering any number of topics. Such infographics are often shared between users of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. The hashtag #infographic was tweeted 56,765 times in March 2012 and at its peak 3,365 times in a span of 24 hours.[21]
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bibiliography
"Infographic." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 09 Mar. 2013. Web. 08 Sept. 2013.
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