How to Turn Data into Different Infographics:
The best infographics are clear, easy to digest, and eye-catching. But the process of distilling data into a neat little chart, bar graph, or venn diagram usually requires pages and pages of messy preparatory sketches, which are rarely seen by the public.
In Infographic Designers’ Sketchbooks, Steven Heller and Rick Landers take readers behind the scenes of the creative processes of more than 50 information architects working today. This colorful collection of doodles, drawings, and digital mock-ups offers invaluable insight into how a pile of statistics can evolve into artful diagrams about anything from the shopping habits of American men to the adulteration of olive oil.
Thomas Porostocky describes working in a slightly chaotic, stream-of-consciousness fashion, which might seem counterintuitive when designing information: he starts with doodles in a notebook, many of which don't result in anything usable, then moves to Illustrator or InDesign. "I build an element or a rough overview of the piece, copy it over to another part of the page and modify it to see if I can make it better. Then I copy that new one over, and modify it again to see how that works. I build upon these elements over and over again, trying new approaches to see what works bets. There are lots of alterations and modifications," he says in the book. His work is all vector-based. "Because I tend to start off right away in a digital format, my sketches often evolve into finals organically."
As communications professionals, a significant part of our job is to tell well-developed stories that engage target audiences. With recent research suggesting that brands have less than four seconds to hold consumers’ attention on a web page before they move on, it’s important now more than ever to consider the various vehicles to tell our brands' and clients’ stories in a compelling way.
To do just that at Text100, we’ve introduced visual storytelling tools—from infographics to video to animations and more—to all our B2C to B2B clients, both big and small.
For example, Adobe was challenged with presenting the results from its email usage consumer survey in a way that captured various audiences’ attention, ensured message penetration and raised awareness for Adobe Campaign, its email campaign platform.
Visual Storytelling for Adobe
For the survey results, which included insight on how U.S.-based white-collar workers use email, Adobe wanted to not only highlight key findings, but also tell a visual story with the data that resonated with several different audiences: consumers, business executives and managers, as well as marketing professionals.
The end result needed to counter current misperception about how email usage was slowing down with the advent of new communication tools such as video conferencing and Slack; Adobe’s data actually showed that the average American spends six hours a day checking email. Additional key messages to highlight included: email will remain a cornerstone of workplace culture; email is causing “FOMO”; email obsession is affecting personal interactions; and finally, Americans look to email detox.
To successfully fulfill these goals, Text100 advised Adobe to develop two different infographics with varying design approaches and messaging.
Bringing Data to Life for Different Audiences: Creating Each Infographic
some reference :
- http://www.fastcodesign.com/3040415/how-designers-turn-data-into-beautiful-infographics
- http://www.pria.com.au/priablog/how-to-turn-data-into-different-infographics-for-different-audiences
