Producing Beautiful Data

Written by Dan Gordon Thursday, 19 May 2011 07:40

So you have opened that expensive image editor and are all ready to get started making a elegant new infographic. You've seen them on all the sites you love so you know how effective they usually are. By having a couple pie charts plus some clever figures your new content will go viral in no time!

So you have opened that expensive image editor and are all ready to get started making a elegant new infographic. You've seen them on all the sites you love so you know how effective they usually are. By having a couple pie charts plus some clever figures your new content will go viral in no time!

People love infographs. Filled with color, illustrations and good design, they provide a visual representation of how large amounts of information relate to each other. Numbers and walls of text are intimidating and often lose the reader before you've even come close to making your point. A large well-organized and designed infograph, on the other hand, can amuse and inform your readers. Inspire them enough and they might even forward it to their friends over social networks.

Then again take care not to make mathetical errors that may actually make you seem like an idiot. Infographs should not just be percentages spat out in a pretty font with some cartoons standing near by. The math behind them is real and influential. Including statistics from various reports may seem like a powerful way to prove your argument, but you could possibly be convincing your readers of how little experience you genuinely have.

To avoid embarrassment, understand how research studies are done. Each research study has different definitions determining who counts. A lot of the categories may seem simple and straight forward (gender, for example) but you'd be surprised! There definitions are not always disclosed in public reports.

If you have to use data from various studies, ensure the figures you're using are percentages of the same thing and that the research processes were actually similar. Get the raw data if you can! For example, 25% of your pizza is certainly much more food when compared with 75% of your hotdog. If your units don't seem to be similar whatever percentages from them wont be either.