Smashing Magazine we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

Data Visualization and Infographics

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

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.
Read more...
Who Is Your Visitor? An Average Profile

By Smashing Editorial, October 3rd, 2007 in How-To | 65 Comments

You never really know who is going to visit your web-site next. You have no idea which configuration will be used, what browser will be installed, which screen resolution will be in use. However, since you'd like to comfort most of your web users, you need to know their habits and the profile of your average visitor — to adapt the design and layout to your users' needs.

Since only 50.4% maximise their browser windows, the screen resolution of 1024x768 doesn't necessarily mean that your users are browsing with 1024px wide screen through your web-site.

According to Roger Johansson's survey, only 50.4% of users maximise their browser windows.

Nothing is more valuable than the statistics you've collected with an analytics tool installed on your web-site; however particularly in the beginning of a new project it's nice to have some good idea of what kind of configuration your visitors will probably use.

In this post we'd like to present the results from recent studies of browser market share, used OS and preferred screen resolution worldwide. Please notice that this data is only an approximation; we've used a number of different sources to get the average numbers we present below. Besides, statistics always depends on the readership and the topic of your project.

Read more...
Reinvigorate’s Snoop: Real-Time Web Analytics

By Smashing Editorial, September 12th, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 41 Comments

by Michael Dobler

How many visitors came to my website last month and how long did they stay? Which were the top referrers and the most popular keywords? If a site owner wants to have answers to these questions a web analytics tool flashes into action. Google Analytics — the dominating flagship on the web analytics landscape — is often the first choice when it comes to measuring users' activities; however there are solutions which can do more and can offer more flexibility which isn't available in Google Analytics.

One of them is Reinvigorate Snoop, an add-on which comes alongside the web analytics tool reinvigorate, enables real-time web analytics and as such might beat the web analytics freak heart faster.

Read more...
Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

By Smashing Editorial, August 2nd, 2007 in Graphics | 548 Comments

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data - tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years. So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we've never thought before?

Let's take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.
Read more...