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Data Visualization and Infographics

By Smashing Editorial, January 14th, 2008 in Graphics, Inspiration | 131 Comments | Forum

The main goal of data visualization is its ability to visualize data, communicating information clearly and effectivelty. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key-aspects in a more intuitive way. Yet designers often tend to discard the balance between design and function, creating gorgeous data visualizations which fail to serve its main purpose — communicate information.

In both print and web design infographics — visual representations of information, data or knowledge — are often used to support information, strengthen it and present it within a provoking and sensitive context, depending on designer’s creativity.

This article presents some spectacular data visualizations and infographics which manage to combine a strong visual appeal with the effective presentation of information.

You might want to take a look at the article Data Visualization: Modern Approaches we’ve written few months ago.

Data Visualization and Infographics

Country Codes of the World
Country Codes of the World maps 245 top-level domain country codes encompassing all United Nations countries as well as numerous islands and territories. Each two-digit code is aligned over the country it represents and is color coded with the legend below for quick and easy reference.

Flags as Infographics
These posters have been designed for the political magazine Grande “Reportagem”. The main idea behind visualization is to turn flags of various countries into infographics by adding a legend to them. For instance: United States. Red: In favor of the war in Iraq. White: Against the war in Iraq. Blue: Don’t know where Iraq is.

Independent: Infographic
Middle-East: who backs immediate cease-fire? The infographic below was published on the front page of the “Independent” magazine during the Middle-East crisis in July 2007.

Virtual countries
This stand present the largest virtual countries according to the gross domestic product of the countries and world’s largest companies.

Net Neutrality
This infographic is supposed to emphasize the importance of net neutrality; it isn’t really a data visualization, but it instantly delivers the message: this is how our future might look like.

Corporate connections:
An extremely compact and useful source of information.

DIZZIA, Gregory M.
This is the documentation of every intimate relationship Gregory Dizzia has ever had. The data spans 23 years.

Amadana Infographics
Amadana is a Japanese company, which explains why they might not have realized that a scapegoat isn’t the same as an “acuarium.” The first row is for that toaster oven, the second and third rows are for an air purifier, while the last is for a hot plate.

The Japanese Wii Safety Manual
This Japanese Wii safety manual is pretty much indicative of Japanese people’s general insanity. [via Gizmodo]

Virtual Water
Simple, clean, elegant and effective. A double-sided poster visualizing the water footprint of products and nations.

Apple’s Tipping Point: Macs For The Masses
Very calm, soft and appealing colors within a clearly presented context. Design by Paul Nixon.

AT&T/Bell System Pre- & Post-Divestiture Chart
Peter Ross. 1985.

Flickr User Model
A slightly more complex data infographics, however still clear and well-presented.

Journey into the Universe (1985)
Information design, 1985.

Megan Jaegerman
A review of Megan Jaegerman’s work by Edward Tufte. Notice how clean and legible the infographics are.

Good Magazine Infographics
In each of its issues Good magazine offers good, even excellent, infographics related to aspects of our life. Some excellent examples below.

Who Participates and what people are doing online
A slightly different presentation of usual charts gives it some uniqueness and appeal. [via Kottke.org]

The Cost of Living on the Bleeding Edge of Gadgetry
Price and market penetration of consumer electronics over the past 50 years. By Arno Ghelfi. Infographics from a quite different perspective.

A year in Iraq
An unusual data visualization which gives information on the type and location of each attack responsible for the 2,592 recorded deaths.

Cubism and Abstract Art
Clean, informative and elegant. Alfred Barr’s work, found in Edward Tufte’s book.

MyMap
A data visualization application capable of rendering the relationships between the user and individuals in the address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in the 60,000-large email archive.the intensity of the relationship is determined by the color intensity of the line. “My Map” allows to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. My Map thus becomes a veritable self-portrait, a visual reflection of personal associations and relationships.

When Bots Attack
Using rented botnets, you can launch hundreds of thousands — even millions — of infobombs at a target, all while maintaining total deniability. In this hypothetical scenario, a single attack launched by China against the US lasts only a few hours, but a full-scale assault lasting days or weeks could bring an entire modern information economy to its knees. This infographic is supposed to illustrate it.

Mapping the Blogosphere
This is what the blogosphere looks like…

Globalization
…what about globalization?

George W. Bush Speech Infographics
An interactive infographic, compares the number of times certain words appear in the address. Both are a nice example of how information design can give readers more ways to evaluate and contextualize a given text or set of data. So simple, but extremely intuitive and clear.

yHaus: BookScape, Query Bursts. Experimental projects by Yahoo! Design Innovation Team. These query bursts depict individual IP numbers that start very popular bursts of search queries. each particle shows a query from a unique location worldwide. bookscape represents about 250,000 illustrations taken from children books, originally collected by the Open Library Project. The experimental interface uses dynamic resampling of image data to place all the images in a single zoomable space, arranged alphabetically by title.

Sources and Resources

Published in Graphics, Inspiration, January 14th, 2008
Tags: dataviz, Graphics, infographics, statistics, vizualization

1.

Evandro Guedes (January 14th, 2008, 3:40 am)

GREAT POST!!!
2.

Mike Seaby (January 14th, 2008, 4:03 am)

There’s some beautiful examples here - in particular MyMap. Loving the wii safety manual btw!
3.

Jon Aizlewood (January 14th, 2008, 4:27 am)

Fantastic post.
Phenomenal post.
Splendiferous post.
Supercalafragilisticexpialadocious post.

Keep up the great work (as always).
4.

Chris Vincent (January 14th, 2008, 4:49 am)

Data is what makes the world turn and to make it look good… is good
5.

Amarjeet Sinh Rai (January 14th, 2008, 4:53 am)

Please fix the link for “When Bots Attack” goes to a wrong page.

Thanks.
6.

uli (January 14th, 2008, 4:59 am)

very interesting collection, thanks!
7.

uyasar (January 14th, 2008, 5:03 am)

Thanks nice collection!
8.

Alexis Brion (January 14th, 2008, 5:04 am)

Nice collection. The Japanese Wii safety manual is hilarious!
9.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (January 14th, 2008, 5:05 am)

@Amarjeet Sinh Rai: thank you, fixed.
10.

bbx (January 14th, 2008, 5:37 am)

I only knew a couple of these. It’s a great list: thoughtful and interesting. It really shows how images can easily deliver a powerful message. It’s not always the case, but when it’s well done and well thought, it works great.
11.

Jorge camoes (January 14th, 2008, 5:39 am)

Great post, as usual, but “communicating information clearly and effectively” is something that several of these examples don’t really do (there are great infographics in the NYT, but the one presented here is not one of them, imho).
12.

Jens Meiert (January 14th, 2008, 6:16 am)

Certainly inspirational but also containing quite some chartjunk and samples for rather bad information design. It would be interesting to see what at least Kaiser Fung thinks and makes of these samples.
13.

Fuadass (January 14th, 2008, 6:29 am)

Amazing post, love the information. and so many examples :)
14.

Fiona (January 14th, 2008, 7:08 am)

I love this list! Thanks! I must get a copy of the Country Codes of the World map for my home office.
15.

Anthony (January 14th, 2008, 7:22 am)

This is a pretty awesome post! Thanks!
16.

Redshift (January 14th, 2008, 7:37 am)

COOOOOOOOL. :-D
17.

Andrew (January 14th, 2008, 8:48 am)

The Cubism and Abstract Art diagram is not by Edward Tufte, although he’s included it as an example in his books. The diagram is by Alfred Barr, as Tufte himself says Link [www.edwardtufte.com].
18.

Nathan (January 14th, 2008, 9:01 am)

Practically everything the Times produces is top notch, and GOOD magazine’s transparency section is always enjoyable. Probably why I subscribe to both.
19.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (January 14th, 2008, 9:42 am)

@Andrew: thank you, fixed.
20.

Alex (January 14th, 2008, 10:38 am)

For more great infographics (and some not-so-great), check out Link [www.visualcomplexity.com]
That site and Edward Tufte give me all the inspiration I need. Great post!
21.

Creativepayne (January 14th, 2008, 12:19 pm)

Awesome, it’s nice to see non web examples mixed in. Thanks
22.

Joke Cricket (January 14th, 2008, 1:04 pm)

Its really Funny and Informative..
23.

jayhan (January 14th, 2008, 7:15 pm)

Cool and inspiring post. I love the clean approach of Virtual Water, brilliant design!
24.

Eryn Whitworth (January 14th, 2008, 8:10 pm)

I am very impressed with this post and hope to see more like it!!
25.

johno (January 14th, 2008, 10:21 pm)

Some truly inspiring examples. Thanks for putting this together. This one is being bookmarked twice :)
26.

kuldeep (January 14th, 2008, 11:53 pm)

Whats a creative post!!
Thank you! really inspired me :)
27.

Edi (January 15th, 2008, 12:59 am)

Usually, Great article
Can’t wait for the next one to come
28.

imaginepaolo (January 15th, 2008, 3:22 am)

Great Post, please help us to stop destroing Campania…
Link [www.imaginepaolo.com]
29.

emptyzpace (January 15th, 2008, 9:30 am)

Great!!
30.

nick (January 15th, 2008, 12:53 pm)

What about Link [www.informationarchitects.jp]?
31.

martin (January 15th, 2008, 3:42 pm)

thank you, awesome! i mean, really.
nothing in the near future will be able to cope with this list, but for the interested:
32.

fedmich (January 16th, 2008, 12:00 am)

wow, those are beautiful thanks
:)
33.

Sonny (January 16th, 2008, 12:47 am)

WONDERFUL :O :D !
34.

Keith (January 16th, 2008, 10:13 am)

This is a really GREAT article…thanks for sharing. Regards, Keith
35.

NL (January 16th, 2008, 8:05 pm)

Very useful collection! Thank you
36.

aqdas malik (January 17th, 2008, 1:05 am)

Link [feltron.com]
37.

Rafael Pol (January 17th, 2008, 5:23 pm)

I Just Love Smashing Magazine. I can’t imagine a life without it.

Thanks!
38.

norman (January 29th, 2008, 3:08 am)

great, really good collection.
39.

Tyler @ Building Camelot (January 29th, 2008, 10:03 pm)

I’m a data guy at work and I LOVE these visualizations! I wish I could apply some of these to explain things at work.
Great site! Keep up the great work!
40.

grace v (February 12th, 2008, 8:37 am)

I love love love infographics done well, but my fav from this post might be the flags as infographics. I think it’s very clever and challenging to use an existing image and then relate true & relevant information in proportion to the simple flag graphics.

And the deathrow scratches are a very simple solution that speaks nicely to the topic.
41.

Jan Alvin (March 6th, 2008, 5:59 pm)

You have a great collection of art pieces.
42.

andol (April 6th, 2008, 6:58 pm)

i like it~
43.

Hisham Abdel Maguid (April 29th, 2008, 10:15 am)

Epic Systems together with Beemode (www.beemode.com) has developed a Data Visualization software “Trend Compass” almost ready to be released soon. It is an extension to Gapminder which was invented by a Swedish Professor. You can view it :

- Link [www.gapminder.org]

We are looking to promote that software in various sectors. It is a new concept in viewing statistics and trends in an animated way. It could be used in presentation, analysis,research, decision making, etc.

Here is one link for part of what we did with some Governmental institution:
Link [www.epicsyst.com]

Here is another link for a project we did with Princeton University on US unemployment :

Link [www.epicsyst.com]

I hope you could evaluate it and give me your comments. So many ideas are there.

In a few days you can test the software by uploading data on our website and getting the corresponding Flash charts. This is for a limited number of users.

Eng. Hisham Abdel Maguid
Epic Systems
Link [www.epicsyst.com]
44.

Arnaud Velten (May 13th, 2008, 6:02 am)

try my isomap ;) 3D iso resume (french texte :/)
Link [www.as-map.com]
45.

Hisham Abdel Maguid (May 15th, 2008, 5:09 pm)

Now you can upload EXCEL and use our Trend Compass Software at :

Link [www.epicsyst.com]

Also see another sample link :

Link [www.epicsyst.com]

Hisham Abdel Maguid
46.

Hisham Abdel Maguid (June 9th, 2008, 2:23 pm)

Try this link on Ads Monitoring on TV Sattelite Channels during April 2008. Pick Duration (Ads daily duration) vs Repeat (Ads repetition per day). Check the Trail Box to get a better view.

Link [www.epicsyst.com]
47.

Arindam Biswas (June 23rd, 2008, 3:56 am)

It is very encouraging to do better and better everyday. Thanks for posting all these.
48.

bily (July 11th, 2008, 10:57 pm)

love it
49.

glen (August 15th, 2008, 1:43 am)

fantastic resource, cheers
50.

giusy (October 25th, 2008, 7:02 am)

thank you for this link, it’s really really fantastic and interesting: I will use some links for my university thesis. thank you.
51.

George (May 5th, 2009, 5:09 pm)

Once again Smashing Magazine hits the nail on the head! Some really good graphics in this list. The first 3 in particular are really good, they are “as simple as possible, and no simpler” the list helped me a lot with my design project so I just wanted to say thanks! (I also added you guys as a resource on my own infographic list Link [suburbanatrophy.com])
52.

Jeremy Yingling (May 21st, 2009, 6:56 am)

I’m actually quite impressed by this list. Most of these lists include some pretty gratuitous graphics that value some visual style over clear presentation of data.

Here’s one I finished recently for consideration in your next list.

Link [www.infojocks.com]