Visual.ly Blog » Storytelling

Journalists, Designers, and Clients: Best Practices for Working as a Team

Anni Murray — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:00:04 +0000

Visual.ly has a vibrant, dynamic marketplace full of clients from a staggering variety of industries. As a result, journalists and designers have to be versatile above all else: able to craft a narrative image that perfectly meets the expectations of the clients.

Here is a user’s guide for the Visual.ly journalist or designer – a how-to for successfully navigating the marketplace to deliver excellent client experiences alongside excellent visualizations.

Articulating the Vision

Every project is an exercise in vision actualization. Each client has a vision. Sometimes it is very specific, which makes writing and designing the infographic relatively easy. And sometimes it’s nebulous, based on a slippery concept or set of criteria that are only vaguely defined. In every case, it’s the journalist or designer’s first job to understand the vision. When the vision is clear, understanding involves doing good research: reading the creative brief, researching the company, and asking clarifying questions. When the vision is murky, understanding requires something more.

Use your research to suggest specific ideas that the client can accept or reject. This helps you narrow down the field of expectations, to hone in on something actionable. If the client continues to waffle, it’s okay to explain why it’s important to have clear parameters before launching the outline or design. This protects you, the designer or journalist. Since the Visual.ly process has two revision cycles each for outlines and design, it’s imperative that the first one get you more than halfway towards your goal.

Constant, Clear Communication

Any collaborative project requires clear communication, and Visual.ly projects are no exception. The more articulate you are when describing your intentions, explaining your creative vision, and asking questions, the more likely you are to create something that satisfies the client’s needs. Pay particular attention to grammar and punctuation. This is a professional communication and, since it’s mostly text-based, how you write directly impacts your reputation with the client and in the marketplace (for obvious reasons, this is doubly true for journalists).

Attentiveness

Sometimes clients are prompt. They answer questions right away and post feedback immediately after an outline is uploaded. But sometimes they delay the project for days or even weeks while they find additional data, schedule internal meetings, or just get swamped with other company business. Consistent, periodic, polite “checking in” posts remind the client that you’re still there, ready to proceed (once every few days is sufficient). If you don’t hear anything in a week, alert your project manager.

As frustrating as it can be to wait for a client, it’s never acceptable to make a client wait for you. As a freelancer, your currency is your attentiveness and reliability. Being available is one of the easiest ways to demonstrate your seriousness, and one of the best ways to get hired for future projects. When you are available, your client can’t complain about deadlines. This is another practice that protects you and your reputation. It also increases the likelihood that your client will make your project a priority and that you will meet the deadlines on your timeline.

Define Your Role

In many cases, clients aren’t familiar with how the Visual.ly workflow typically proceeds. They don’t necessarily understand that the journalist’s outline comes first, the design second. They may ask the journalist design questions, or come to the designer with concerns about the copy.

When a journalist is assigned to a project, she is assigned for a reason. Typically the copy is complex, the vision is multifaceted, or extensive research is needed. If you are a journalist, make sure you respond to every copy-related question, regardless of to whom the question is posed. On the flip side, if you’re asked a design question, defer that question to the designer. Hazarding an answer may only confuse the client, adding a layer of obfuscation to an already complicated process.

In order to keep roles carefully defined, you must constantly monitor all project communications. Don’t ignore client messages because they happen to be directed to other members of the team. Read everything and respond promptly whenever it is appropriate to do so. Remember also to respect the people you’re working with. Stepping on toes sparks hard feelings even between the most professional freelancers.

Handling Problems: Offer Multiple Solutions

Since the Visual.ly design process is tightly scheduled, it’s important to handle problems quickly. If the client is unhappy with a paragraph of copy or with a particular graphic, offer two or three alternatives rather than just one. You can use the project center to float ideas before you upload a complete draft. Clients appreciate having options, and are more likely to articulate their preferences when they see multiple possible solutions.

Anni Murray is a writer, editor, multimedia artist, amateur mycologist, and biology student. She is currently working on Prism, a speculative science fiction story cycle. All opinions expressed in this article are her own. Follow her on Twitter.

The Story of a Knight

Marco Sors — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:20:46 +0000

Marco Sors created an interesting map that tells the story of a Knight. Here is his take on the creative process of a multimedia story.

Can history be fun? With visual storytelling, maybe yes.

Story of a Knight infographic

I’ve built the hypothetical adventure of a medieval knight using the recent resources of frontend development, to show how the past can be reinterpreted and become contemporary: Story of a knight. Use the numbers on the bottom-right to move the knight around Italy, Balkan area and Austria in a sort of “self-growth novel”.

I’ve used and merged some technologies:

The background is a big Google map iframe (covered by a parchment in alpha opacity to give an ancient look and feel)

Multimedia contents with HTML5 video and audio tag

Font-face with old taste (Essay1743)

jQuery plugin Scrollpath by Joel Besada to animate the DOM

Icons used in a infographic way

The red color in details is useful to give a recurring element and narrative coherence.
It would be nice to do something similar (but more in-depth) to tell the life of important historical figures like Carlo Magno, Marco Polo, Cristoforo Colombo, Napoleone…and so on.

Marco Sors is a freelance front-end developer who fell in love with visual storytelling, infographics and data visualization. Check out the blog cartesiani.it (in italian) or his personal website www.web-expert.it

The Dark Side of Visual Storytelling: 5 Mistakes You Should Avoid

Aleksandra Todorova — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:43:52 +0000

Visual storytelling is quickly emerging as one of the big buzz words of 2013.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, when done right, visual storytelling can add immense value to your marketing strategy or PR campaign — or it could play a key role in impressing your manager with that “visual” performance report and help you get a promotion.

Communicating a message through an infographic or data visualization can reach more viewers and have a stronger impact than doing it the old-fashioned way, with words, numbers and spreadsheets. We recently talked about these advantages with a case study of A Tale of Two Cows, a Visual.ly infographic that has been seen by more than 105,000 people on our site alone and hundreds of thousands more across other platforms.

But if it isn’t done right — or if it’s approached with the wrong expectations — visual storytelling can, at best, fail to produce the results you want.

The problem is that many people approach visual storytelling with unreasonably high or simply wrong expectations. So let’s take a look at some of the common misconceptions about visual storytelling — and how those can be worked out.

1. The groundbreaking/ viral story you want your data to tell just isn’t there

So you have lots of data generated by your company (or its users) and would like to see it all laid out in a beautiful, ground-breaking, viral infographic. The problem is, the data may not support the story you want to tell. Your company sales may not be going up as steeply as you’d want, or that year-to-year change may look flatter when presented with a line chart than you thought it would.

The biggest risk? Giving in to the temptation to fudge the visualization by playing with the scale or even changing the data itself. Don’t do it! Even if no one finds out (and these days, chances are good someone might), you will know forever that the story you gave the world was wrong.

2. You have a great story in mind… but can’t find the data to support it

This happens often when you have a specific storyline in mind and very little flexibility around it. So you set out to do some research and find the data that will help you craft that story… but have difficulty finding exactly what you need.

First, please understand this: visual storytelling doesn’t work like advertising. You can’t just film a bunch of actors playing happy family, dancing in an SUV, and bam: viewers will believe that you have the safest and coolest car on the market. If you don’t have the data to support the story you are trying to tell, you can’t really create a credible infographic about it.

The biggest risk: too often, clients in this situation simply withhold data and try to be as vague with their claims as possible. This results in a non-data visualization, simply text on an image. It is very easy for people to see through these non-stories, and hardly ever results in a successful product.

3. You’ve got too much data and want to visualize all of it

Got big data? Good. You want to visualize all of it in one infographic? Could be your worst idea ever.

On the one hand, you could end up with a beautiful visualization, something that looks like this or this.

But you could also find yourself with a bunch of indecipherable charts or tables and end up blaming the designer for failing to create something beautiful out of all the data you gave them. In reality, if you spend some time parsing through your data and practicing the art of exclusion, you’d be gaining so much more than the time (and possibly resources or money) that you spent.

4. Your expectations are too high

Depending on your budget, commissioning an infographic or data visualization project can seem expensive. And because infographics are still relatively new in content marketing, you may have had to convince your manager to come up with a budget you didn’t previously have. So no one can blame you for wanting an end product that does it all: looks amazing, tells your story, makes people love your brand, goes viral.

The problem is, chasing this be-all and end-all of infographics is like trying to walk under a rainbow: barring a case of otherworldly luck, not possible. You could spend five months working on an infographic, going through seventeen iterations and getting approval (and accommodating the desires) of twenty-five managers, and still end up with an infographic that is seen by 5,000 people. Or you could spend those five months producing five infographics (for the same budget, because each of those 17 iterations will pile up on your costs), which collectively get more than 25,000 views. Which strategy was more successful?

5. You have all this data — and no idea what to do with it

This is actually one of the better problems to have with visual storytelling. There are people who now specialize in creating infographics — Visual.ly, of course, being the premier place to find them — and they can help you find a good story and tell it in an appealing way.

The key here is to listen to their advice – and trust that they know best what to do and how to do it. Too often, of course, that trust is hard to earn and, as iShotHim Creative Director Mike Jeters said at a recent Visual.ly meetup, the process of helping a client focus their story isn’t always easy, or quick:Image: Mike Jeters, iShotHim

The situation you don’t want to end up in is the one we described in the previous section: spending five months on an infographic that should have been completed in three weeks. Finding the right people to work with and trusting that they will do the best job possible for you and your goals should help you avoid that trap.

Infographics and data visualizations have been used by journalists for decades, but are still a relative newcomer to the corporate and non-profit worlds. Commissioners can learn a lot from data journalists, who usually produce visualizations under tight deadlines, with the main objective and accountability of telling a true story rather than a viral story. If you can avoid the five missteps outlined above, you will be on your way to better understanding the process of creating infographics and visual storytelling.

Featured image: Racheal Grazias / Shutterstock.com

Aleks Todorova is the Editorial Director of Visual.ly and has been working on telling stories for and with infographics for the past three years. Follow her on Twitter.

Visual Storytelling: A Tale of Two Cows

Drew Skau — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:00:38 +0000

Visually recently published an infographic that illustrated a joke from the 1940s. The story in the joke was roughly the same as the story has always been, the main thing that changed is the illustrations helping to show the concepts in the story. But the graphic passed 76,000 views on Visual.ly (and almost 600,000 views across other sites) in less than 4 days, and shows no signs of slowing down. In the meantime, the same text version of the joke has a limited number of shares on social networks.

A Tale of Two Cows infographic by kylatomdesign.

Why has the visual version been so successful?

1. It’s a great story to begin with
First, let’s be honest; the joke itself is golden. It has survived through huge changes in popular culture over many decades. It is entertaining and mildly educational, and as long as people band together in groups with socioeconomic rules, some form of the joke will probably exist.

But text versions of the joke have existed for a long time. Why the sudden interest in it now?

2. The visual version is easier to “consume”
Visual storytelling is fun. If done well, it communicates the concepts clearly, reducing the cognitive load on the viewer. This increases their reward/effort ratio for taking the time to consume the content. This results in a happier viewer, and happy people want to share their happiness, which contributes to the viral nature of the content.

3. Its storyline is consistent…
Not all “stories” are great candidates for visual storytelling, though. The key in this case is that the concept is relatively similar for each culture. There are a limited number of characters involved: cows, yourself and a third party. This means that the illustrations are all variations on each other, making it simple to compare the concepts across each iteration.

4. …and just the right amount of “simple”
Stories are better candidates for visual storytelling when they have just the right level of complexity.

Another factor in the success of this joke’s conversion to a visual format is the simplicity of the concepts. They can easily be illustrated with simple illustrations, and the illustrations really do make the concepts clearer than the text would have. The complexity of the piece comes from the overall aggregate, not from any individual component.

Visual storytelling is not appropriate for every story, but in many cases it certainly can help the story. And it certainly can improve the share-ability of the story — in this case, particularly so.

Drew Skau is Visualization Architect at Visual.ly and a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC with an undergraduate degree in Architecture. You can follow him on twitter @SeeingStructure

A Closer Look at Garbage

Steph Guinan — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:00:04 +0000

Steph Guinan recently finished an infographic on garbage creation in the US. This is some of what she discovered during her research on the topic.

The EPA estimates that each person in the US produces 4.43 pounds of garbage per day. With a growing population, even moderate attempts to reduce the cycle of consumption and disposal have not been enough to plateau the country’s total trash production. When considering the ways in which we interact with our environment, it is critical for us to examine and understand our waste. Data visualization can aid this understanding and better equip us to adjust our consumption and disposal habits.

A Closer Look at Garbage infographic by flapjackmedia.

Trash is Big Business

Waste management is a $55 billion industry, according to the Waste Business Journal. Projections of growth expect the industry to reach $60 billion by 2016. The data has shown that waste management is an economic area that is nearly recession proof. Even in hard economic times, disposal of trash is a public service that still must be addressed. Although increases in total trash production may be good for the garbage business, it has a lasting environmental impact that warrants researching greener solutions.

Slowing the Cycle of Garbage

When taking a critical look at the trash generated by our households and businesses, the first step is to closely review the materials we consume. The easiest step in reducing our waste is to make smarter purchasing choices by selecting products with less packaging and looking for alternatives to single-use products. Before making a purchase, we might also consider second-hand products or reach out to community members to share resources and tools.

Smart Disposal

Of the four methods that broadly categorize trash disposal, recycling and composting are the most environmentally friendly. Even with the resources used to recycle glass, aluminum, and plastic, there is a net positive when compared to the resources saved in production of new material and the cost of other disposal methods. Landfills and incinerators both have significant environmental impact. Incinerators are known to have a tremendous effect on air quality, and there has been increased documentation of health impacts that result from this pollution. It is also widely known that landfills are a source of pollution when protection systems break down, and they leech toxic chemicals into the ground and water. With so much pollution resulting from our garbage, it’s hard to imagine that anything good could come from these processes. However, there have been small steps to generate energy from our garbage by recapturing the byproducts of combustion and harvesting the methane released from decomposition in landfills.

Anatomy of a Dumpster

The most significant components of US waste are food scraps and yard trimmings. Although more than half of all yard trimmings are composted, only 3% of food scraps are composted after they enter the waste cycle. Publicly available compost units have had a significant impact on preventing more trash from entering our landfills. However, this compost data does not reflect any garbage that is addressed before it enters the waste stream. Backyard composting is an alternative to waste disposal and reduces our environmental footprint. A DIY compost system is easy to start at your home, business, or school.

Steph Guinan is a freelance data visualization designer located in the mountains of North Carolina. You can keep up with her latest projects at flapjackmedia.wordpress.com.

Visually Marketplace Designer Spotlight: Accurat

Visually — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:00:14 +0000

Visually’s Marketplace connects thousands of designers with clients seeking to commission infographics and data visualizations. Every week, we feature a member of our designer community here, on the blog. If you are interested in participating, please contact us at blog[at]visual.ly.

Name: Accurat
Age: partners 32, team 26
On Visually: Accurat
In Design: 10 years

1. Tell us a bit about yourself: how did you get into design, and how long have you been doing it?
Accurat was born in May 2011 as an information design agency. Even though the 3 associates (Giorgia, Gabriele, Simone) have different backgrounds and roles in the company, we all envision and feel that identifying proper (and new) ways to structure information in the different fields can reveal and address latent needs and open desires and opportunities.

We analyze contexts, research specific phenomena and data, identify stories and patterns, structure methods and strategies to address precise needs, envision and build design solutions, we mock-up and prototype; and we design and develop data visualizations, interactive applications, interfaces and multimedia environments to let stories emerge from the complex systems of information.

Giorgia and Simone shared a past common experience at Interaction-design lab and Gabriele comes from a background in motion graphics and video production with his former company, Bonsaininja Studio.

Giorgia is the design director, she conceptualizes user experiences and visual models, she is responsible of the design of data visualizations. Giorgia’s background is architecture with a focus on urban dynamics mapping; plus she has been composing music and practicing contemporary dance for a while, she is fascinated with and inspired by abstract visual art. The sum of these components makes her a certainly non-conventional “information designer.”

Simone is the content manager, he analyzes data and phenomena, he directs editorial projects. Simone is a sociologist, a designer, a teacher, and a “fantasy-football” expert. He is interested in urban dynamics, local development processes, new service models, but most of all in food and in the football system. He’s the guy that spots interesting stories in data.

Gabriele is the managing director, coming from a solid visual design background he organizes teams, projects and technologies day to day; among all of Accurat’s projects he’s now coordinating the consortium behind *UrbanSensing, a European Community funded project that is fulfilling his dream of working all day long on maps, perceived environments and recognition and memory of places.

So as you can see, we have a permanent staff experienced in strategic, conceptual and visual design, data science and interaction design and development.

2. In 7 words or less, describe your style.
analytical, abstract, modernist, unconventional, naïf, unpredictable, solid.

3. If you could take a seminar with one designer or artist, dead or living, who would that be? Why?
It really depends on the definition of Designer, actually. We got the news that now the Pope is available for freelancing, so why not? He would probably know a lot of interesting things. If not him, maybe John Cage, John Maynard Keynes, Marco Polo, Marshall McLuhan or Roland Barthes.

4. What’s your favorite color? Why?
All but the mandatory light pink background imposed by Corriere Della Sera, our publisher for the visualizations on La Lettura. (joking, but not so much. )
# F2E8DB

5. What is the biggest mistake you’ve made in your work and what did you learn from it?
We constantly make mistakes, that’s how you learn. Every day we learn something new on how to address needs, build effective work teams, share our inspirations and knowledge and look at our future, as a company. Probably the biggest one has yet to come, but we are ready.

6. What about your biggest achievement? Tell us about the project you are most proud of in your career so far.
We are definitely proud with one big project we started last Fall: *UrbanSensing

*UrbanSensing is a two-year EC-funded project (FP7 Program) we are coordinating as Accurat, and which involves six European partners in total. The project aims at designing and developing a platform extracting patterns of use and citizens’ perceptions related or concerning city spaces, through robust analysis of User Generated Content (UGC) shared by the city users and inhabitants over social networks and digital media.

The assumption behind the project is that, if properly analyzed, geo-tagged and user generated contents coming for example from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram can be useful in the creation of meaningful, real time indicators of people’s perceived and narrated urban experience.

The platform will allow us to analyze users’ perceptions related to specific geographic areas and understand how population reacts and talks about what happens in the city: you can imagine it as a real time visual thermometer of the pulse of the city.

This said, we definitely love and enjoy so much our collaboration with La Lettura, which we might be mostly known for.

Latitude Urbanism? infographic by accurat.

Comparing historical atlases infographic by accurat.

7. Who should we feature in this space next?
(If we can look also outside of the Marketplace we would definitely say Density Design!)

Below, the Accurat team at work!

America and Firearms: Split Over Ownership or United Over Safety?

Visually — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 20:30:40 +0000

The horrible tragedy of Newtown, Conn. has brought to the forefront the issue of gun ownership and regulation in the United States. Should the government act on restricting sales of firearms and do more extensive background (and medical record) checks on potential owners? What about educating owners on firearm safety? To gauge America’s stance on these contentious issues, Visually partnered with SurveyMonkey Audience. These are the results of the survey, visualized.

by anibalinfographics. Browse more data visualization.

Seeing is Believing: A Designerly “how-to” for “non-designers”

MarkDWest — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:00:46 +0000

Mark D. West is one of the authors on Stories That Move Mountains, a book about using stories and visuals to make top notch presentations. We’re teaming up with Wiley & Sons Publishing to give away three free copies of the book, just leave a comment with a tip for making great visual presentations to enter into the random drawing!

Publication Date: December 17, 2012
ISBN-10: 1118423992
ISBN-13: 978-1118423998
Edition: 1

So you’ve got some killer content, you’ve identified your audience and you know them well, and you even know the story you want to tell. Now it’s just you and your computer, notebook, pencils, markers… and a dry-erase board—if you’re feeling adventurous.

You would LOVE to go hire a graphic designer—and heck, you might even still do that, but the budget for your new initiative it TIGHT. You need to at least TRY doing this yourself. Should you risk it? WHY NOT!

The first rule is to pay attention to how often you use CAPS—sorry I couldn’t resist. But seriously…

I am one of the co-authors of a new book called Stories that Move Mountains, and in this book we cover a process that takes you from content, through audience analysis, and story structure, to creating great designs and telling an engaging story—it’s called “CAST.” In this post I’m going to just focus on what you can do with the design stage (“tell”) once you have all the content worked out.

The real first rule: be patient. Creating a compelling presentation is going to involve trying some things—and this whole design thing may (or may not) be new to you—you’ve got to go easy on yourself. Realize that you will only get better over time.

Yes, design involves a “visual eye,” but it also involves the ability to compare and contrast elements as you try things. Oh, remember I mentioned trying things? Time to jump in!

By example, let’s focus on three primary design principles: scale (the sizing of elements), color and font choices. With each one of these things, we’ll ask similar questions. It’s assumed you are familiar with graphics or presentation software of your choice. You should be able to ask these same questions for just about all design principles, as discussed in the book, but at the end of the day, it tends to come down to these items when focused on your final visual delivery:

“What do I want to see first?”
(This is hierarchy, to make sure your message is clear).

“How does the arrangement of elements feel?”
(This is the squint test/Gestalt, and how the pieces are perceived as a whole).

And then: compare and contrast as you change things. It takes little discipline at first, but over time, it will come more naturally.

Consider the form your content will take on the page. Should it be a shape? An illustration? Should it be read as text? A combination of these items? What’s color(s) will you use, and how will colors and other elements be taken together as a whole? (That’s the “how does it feel” part).

You have decided on some content that needs to be in font form, as well as other shapes that need a color scheme.

Scale: This concept seems simple, and it probably IS the simplest of our three example principles. Lead with the question, “how large should this grouping of elements or single element be in relation to what’s around it?” Scale it up and down (be careful to scale proportionately)—and then compare, asking: “how does it feel when I do that?”
Compare and contrast.

Color: Color involves many choices, including how it’s interpreted across cultures. That said, it’s also important to see how it looks, and develop some kind of color palette or combination that not only is interpreted correctly in your coding system, but also feels right together. Invest in a color wheel, a book on color, or for the most dynamic reference, a book on color combinations—a great example being the Color Index, by Jim Krause. Color your shapes, elements, type, etc. and then compare and contrast. Okay, is there a pattern starting to emerge here? Try combinations that involve warm and cool colors, remembering that warm colors attract and cool recede. You’ll definitely know you have a problem when you stare a little too long, and a certain color combination leaves an “afterimage” on your retinas! When using a palette of colors, they all need to “harmonize” together, and an easy way to do that is by using similar color saturations (pastels being an example). If using a palette with one or two colors that are more saturated than the others, realize that those will “pop out” a little more than others.

Type choices: Type is one of the most underrated and overlooked aspects of design—and it is meant to be seen AND read. Jim’s also got a Type Idea Index too. Start by determining a headline and put it side-by-side with the same text set in another font—also try adjusting the size. Do this for anywhere from 2-5 fonts (same text): and compare and contrast. Realize that even your smaller copy will affect the feel of your design. Try different fonts with any smaller copy, remembering that too much text in a presentation will end up leaving your audience conflicted… as they will want to read the text and listen to you at the same time. Regardless, all text should be taken as a whole, and you should ask how it feels when taken in its entirety, which is a great segue to…

Start putting the whole lot together. How do all of the elements feel when taken as a whole? Try a few revisions—especially in scale and precise placement and then—yes—you guessed it: compare and contrast.

And if all of that seems a bit too complex for your tastes, you can always head on over to the Visually Marketplace!

Interaction Design, MetroCard Art: Q&A With Nina Boesch

Rani Molla — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:00:03 +0000

Nina Boesch was designing and writing what looked like code before she got her first computer — and she was the first kid in her class in Bremen, Germany, to have one.

These days, the 33-year-old has her sights on much more complex design aided by much more complex technology. Specializing in interaction design, Boesch essentially makes digital devices play well with humans. Her work goes a long way into making websites more engaging and to make offline computer projects appear ripe for Web 5.0.

When she is not using a computer, the Rhode Island School of Design graduate collects Metro cards from the floors of New York City subways for collages whose materials are intrinsically tied to their subject matter.

Boesch has received numerous awards for her work, including distinctions by the Art Directors Club, AIGA and Adobe. She is currently a senior interaction designer at New York’s Ralph Appelbaum Associates. We talked with Boesch about the the present and future of interaction design.

What are the tenets of good interaction design?
I believe that good interaction design is reflected in an intuitive, easy-to-understand user experience that leaves no room for confusion. The more self-explanatory an experience is, the more successful the interaction design is.

Are there any current trends in interaction design that you particularly like or dislike?
Like: Like most people, I am a big fan of the Apple interface. They just get it right. Sure, there are some occasional hiccups as with the recent launch of the maps app, but in general the iOS is pure genius.

Dislike: I cannot get used to QR codes as an interface. They are the opposite of instant gratification, as they are certainly not instant and hardly ever gratifying. If I need not only a camera and a third-party app but also a steady hand and good lighting conditions, then the application has simply failed. It’s like the Word paperclip, fun and cute when you first see it but the second time around you just want it to go away.

Do you have a favorite or go-to technology?
Every project is so unique in its application that it’s hard to have a go-to technology. I like reliable touchscreens, iPhones and tablets and I like to stay away from interactive IR projections and touch foils, but that’s about it. Of course it’s hardly ever realistic to limit yourself to touchscreens. For example, Ralph Appelbaum Associates recently opened a museum in Moscow (The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center), which includes an interactive star-shaped table with a diameter of about 15 feet. Obviously, there are no giant star-shaped touch-screens, so we used touch-foils to enable user interaction.

Your designs frequently bring online solutions to bear the real world. For example, your interactive model of lower Manhattan uses lights to highlight different sections of a 3-D model of lower Manhattan; the Digital Cheder book made an ancient text interactive. If you could make one thing in real life more like online, what would it be?

Shortcuts to our human operating system. Imagine, we could use Command+Z to undo real-life actions. Or Command+delete to get rid of a bad memory or event in your life. And if you are looking for your keys or wallet, Command+F will find it for you. I could go on and on about this, but I think you get the idea.

As far as going the other way, do you feel there’s a place anymore for skeuomorphism (the practice of using real-world ideas and elements in digital interfaces)?

I have never been a big fan of skeuomorphism in everyday digital applications, like the compasses, clock or bookshelves on smartphones and tablets. These apps are cute for kids to learn the different apps and what they represent in real life, but otherwise they are a little tacky.

I do think though, that there is a place for skeuomorphism in digital application, especially for cultural institutions. For example, at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, we included a gallery that allows visitors to browse through a digital Torah. Just like in real life, our Torah had an old paper texture, consisted of one long scroll and it was only to be interacted with via a yad – not with fingers.

Do you have any favorite pieces of interactive design/favorite interactive designers?
I get excited about interactive infographics. There is just something appealing about graphics that take time and engagement to understand. To me, nicely designed infographics are artworks – they may provide the most banal content, but I still enjoy looking at them. (I don’t have a single designer or a single application that I can consider my absolute favorite. I can fall in love with a student’s work and I may be bored to death by an interactive NYTimes infographic… even though they are usually great.)

Women still make up a small percentage of coders/interaction designers. Why?
It’s true, every single programmer I work with or have ever worked with is male. But why? I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter much to me whether I work with men or women. It seems like in the creative world – and I consider programmers creatives – the respect and acceptance is not based on gender but on people skills, one’s sense for design and the ability to communicate.

While at Pentagram (2006-2009), I worked under Lisa Strausfeld, who is an amazing strategist and an infographics rockstar. She even won the prestigious National Design Award in 2010. Maybe it’s her influence in my career which made me not care too much about the imbalance of women and men in the field. Women may be the minority, but their impact is just as great.

Q: Your MetroCard Collages are such a divergence from your other work. How does your analog/physical work fit in with your digital work?

My collages made from cut-up used and expired MetroCards are my escape from the digital world. I used to do a lot of freelance website work on the side, but I realized that even though I like pushing pixels on a screen, I like it better to not do that in my spare time.

I may not look like it, but I’ve always had an artsy side. From painting and pottery to book making and letterpress printing, I’ve done everything that allows me to be creative without the need for a computer screen.

In a way, my collages are still pixel-based, since I am using mostly square pieces of cut up MetroCards. The effect is the same: When you view my collages up close you can see the individual MetroCard pieces/the pixels, but from far away, you see the overall image, not the individual pieces. A major difference between my digital work and my collages is of course the fact that I can set my own rules in my collages – my physical MetroCard pieces don’t need to follow a horizontal/vertical grid, and I can make them whatever size I want. I think it’s this freedom in the analog arts, that makes me enjoy it so much.

What does the future hold for interaction design?
It’s impossible to speculate what future interfaces will look like, because we don’t know what kind of technology we will have in let’s say 10 years from now. Personally I am a big believer in transparent screens. There have been some prototypes but they are not 100% convincing yet. But yes, I’m sure if I should re-read this comment in a few years I may laugh about the fact that back then in 2012, we didn’t have transparent screens.

I think we will soon laugh about computer screens that have a 72 dpi resolution. And the fact that we currently have to wait a few seconds for a program or app to open will be a problem of the past very soon. Mobile devices will replace desktop computers, they will get lighter and their batteries will last weeks instead of hours. All of these technological improvements will direct the interaction design. We will no longer have to worry if a program will load fast enough just because we decided to use a 3D structure as navigation. We will have to make less and less compromises in the design and performance of an application, because we will no longer be limited by technology.

Rani Molla has a digital media master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. She’s a journalism reader, writer, photographer, videographer, data visualizer and general doer. Follow her on Twitter.

The 5 Key Ingredients of Great Infographics

Aleksandra Todorova — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:00:27 +0000

Everyone wants a great infographic.

Generic as it sounds, it’s overwhelmingly true. Commissioners — the companies that hire designers or design firms to create infographics — want great results, whether it’s social media sharing, coverage by large websites and media or even achieving specific goal conversion rates. Designers want to work on and ultimately create a great piece that they are proud to include in their portfolio. And end users… well, they just like to look at great things that are beautiful, informative, original and shareable, ideally all at once.

So how do you make a great infographic?

In the past, we’ve talked about creating viral infographics and the role that story, data and design play there.

But viral doesn’t always equal “great” in a more conservative sense: a solid, informative, ethical piece that is beautifully designed and flawlessly executed. (Case in point: the Should I Text Him flowchart is simple, shareable and super fun. It is one of the most popular graphics on Visual.ly to date. But is it going to win a Malofiej 20 award next year, or any year? Doubtful.)

by beccaclason. Learn about infographics software.

Creating an infographic that is successful in the eyes of the client, design firm and audience is often elusive — but not impossible. At Visual.ly, we start out each project trying to do just that. Unfortunately, some projects get highjacked by corporate branding demands or unrealistic expectations (on part of the commissioner or designer… or both!). But others succeed. From our most successful projects (and the experience of going through not-so-successful ones), we’ve extrapolated what we consider to be the key ingredients of producing infographics we can all share with pride.

1. The idea

All successful infographics start out the same way – with a great idea. To come up with a great idea, it helps to think like a journalist. Journalists, unless they are covering breaking news, usually work with cycles. Take the personal finance space: in November and December, everyone writes about holiday spending and saving. In January, it’s credit card debt hangover. February: love and money. March: taxes. And so on. Every year, the stories are similar, if not the same. So everyone looks for new angles or interesting ways to tell those stories. Some succeed, many get lost in the noise.

Same with infographics: chances are, your idea has already been done. Can you tell it in a new, more interesting way? Can you tie it into a recent event or interesting trend? Can you find a useful and informative angle that will really benefit your target audience? If not, you will only be putting your name and company logo on a piece that will become one of many — but not one that stands out.

2. The data

Many data visualization professionals, especially in the academic community, start with a data set and dig for stories in it. That is a great way to find new and interesting stories — provided you’ve got a good data set to work with, of course. But in corporate world, many commissioners are unwilling to take on the risk that their data will tell a story they (or their CMO) will not like.

So projects often start out with an idea, followed by chasing after the data to support it. If the idea is focused and flexible (i.e. we can change things if the data we find points us in a different or more interesting direction), great. If not, however, finding the data to support and visualize it is often a wild goose chase. Those are usually the cases where you must resort to questionable sources or even tweak data points in order to tell the story you are set on telling. This is wrong on many counts. For more on proper research and sourcing practices, please read our guide.

3. Willingness to let things go

Too often, we end up with more data than is needed to make a single infographic. And that’s perfectly fine — as long as the client is OK with excluding some (or a lot!) of it from the piece we’re working on. Trying to say everything with one infographic almost always results in a piece no one wants to read: either because there is just too much information in it and it becomes overwhelming, or because it lacks an actual story.

If you find it impossible to cut data out, get a fresh set of eyes. Here, your designer can be incredibly helpful: ask them what they would leave out if they were confined with certain print dimensions. What is the most interesting story that they see?

4. Honesty and humility

Think your company’s new product or factory is interesting enough to showcase in an infographic? Unless your new product is the cure for cancer or your new factory was built on the Moon… chances are most people won’t care. Blatant self-promotion will also make it very difficult if not impossible to garner interest and pickup — not to mention, respect — from mainstream media and large websites. Even if you do have super interesting, never-before-released data, try to present it the way a respected publisher would: focus on the data and the story, not on the branding.

5. Trust

Finally: trust your team. Your researcher and/ or editor know best how to find and tell a good story. Your data analyst knows best what your data says. Your designer knows best how to design. Trust those people to do the best job they can do, because you can be sure that they are trying. Being too controlling as a client or showing in any way that you do not trust the team will only alienate them – you will lose their trust, but worse, you will lose their creativity and eagerness to produce something that they, too, will showcase with pride.

Credit for cover image (cc, licensed for commercial use): Ashley Coombs

Aleks Todorova is a former financial journalist, now the Editorial Director at Visual.ly. Follow her on Twitter.