Lesson 7: Data Visualization and Infographics


Infographic Design

The Office of National Statistics (ONS, 2013) explains what an infographic is not. They state that “an infographic is not a visual list, a group of large numbers with supporting graphics, a collection of stats, or codependent on another release, article, or report” (para 2.). Instead, ONS (2013, para 2.) define an infographic as “a self-contained visual story, presenting information, data, or knowledge clearly, with meaning and context, and without bias.” Technically, someone should be able to read an infographic without reading any additional text or background information. The infographic itself should contain all the meaning and context that you would like to convey. If you are not familiar with infographics, you can find some examples of infographics here. One of the main goals of infographics is to make complex data easy to understand. Before you create an infographic, there are several aspects you should take in consideration.

Target audience

First, you would need to determine who your target audience is that you want to communicate your visual message to. This will influence the tone or style you may use to communicate your message visually. Like in any instructional design, it is important to think about the level of expertise of your target audience and how much they already know about your topic. An infographic about smoking may look different when creating one for elementary school students compared to creating one for their parents. You may also want to think about the cultural background of your audience and make sure that any of your icons, vectors, and other visuals you may use would be appropriate and meaningful across cultures.

Purpose / Key message

After you identified your target audience, you should decide what the purpose of your infographic will be. What would be the main thing that you want your target audience to know about your data or information? An infographic should contain meaningful information and go beyond the display of numbers and statistics. It is therefore important to determine what your main message to your target audience will be. When your target audience glances at your infographic, this main message should become clear to them within a few seconds.

Reflection activity:

Compare these three infographics to each other. Who is their main target audience? What is the main purpose of their message? How do you think the target audience and purpose differs from one infographic to the other? How can you tell? Think about style, tone, and color that is used.

Visual Design

Once you have identified your target audience and the main purpose of your message, you can start to design your message visually. It may be best to start to sketch out your first design on paper or in PowerPoint. In lesson 2, you learned about visual perception and how people tend to group objects together based on proximity and the use of similar shapes and colors. In addition, you may also remember from lesson 2 that people only have a limited working memory. Therefore, try to accommodate the limitations of people’s working memory by not displaying more than four to seven perceptual units or chunks of information (Malamed, 2009). In lesson 3, you learned about the impact of shapes and colors on emotion. You can use the concepts from these lessons to make your infographic more meaningful and accessible.

As you design your infographic, make sure that your design is arranged orderly and logically and that you represent your data accurately. According to Malemed (2009), bad design is one of the main reasons why information is misinterpreted by your target audience. Take advantage of the use of lines, colors, labels, captions, textures, shapes, and boxes to highlight the comparisons, patterns, groupings, and trends that you believe are important for your audience to understand. Try to display your message in the most simple but accurate way you possibly can. An effective infographic should almost force your target audience to understand your message immediately (Malamed, 2009).

Avoid bias

As you learned from David McCandless’s TED presentation, data or information is not always neutral. For example, it makes a big difference whether you explain the power of armies of different countries based on the amount of soldiers, amount of money spend in general, or as the percentage of the GDP per country. Remember that all visual messages are constructions. They only represent reality but are not reality. Your data selections and ways of presenting this information may intentionally or unintentionally influence the way your audience understands your message and the meaning they attach to your visuals. When creating infographics, it is therefore very important to understand how you represent your information and whether this is in line with the message you try to convey. While any choice of data points or information may display bias (as you unavoidably exclude other information), try to be aware of how you represent your data. Attempt to represent it as truthfully and accurately as possible.

It it is important to get the data for your infographic from reliable sources. Rather than taking information from a news site or a Wiki, track down your original source (Krum, 2014). In addition, be sure to add the link to your data source in your infographic. This should be a link to the specific data source rather than the overall website. Some examples of websites that can help you access reliable data for your infographic are the U.S. Government’s open data source Data.gov, the Worldbank’s Open Data source, and the databank of the United Nations.

Next, please read Chapter 6: Designing Infographics from the book Cool infographics: Effective Communication With Data Visualization and Design by Randy Krum. In this chapter, he explains in detail which factors to take into account when designing an infographic. Even though his book appears to be aimed towards businesses and marketing industries, the principles and concepts that he explains can be applied to any context. You can access Randy Krum’s book via this link. You need to select the "Not listed? Click here" in the "Select your institution" list, then sign-in the O'Reilly website with your VT email address. If it is the first time for you to use the O'Reilly books with your VT email address, you may need to sign up.