Infographics have become a candy on the internet.  On social networking sites that drive traffic like digg and reddit, there’s bound to be a graphic representation of some story in a home grown chart or graph on any given day. With the emergence of this DIY infograph culture and popularity, its important to remain critical and make sure, are these graphics telling the whole story?

DIY design is a much discussed phenomena among professionally trained designers.  It provides some of the more basic tools to the not-so-professionals, so they can flex their creative muscles and make funny t-shirts like the rest of us. But, the lack of formal training is a huge avenue for criticism.  Thanks to the internet, transparency of information and the dissemination of people’s opinions and analysis is much more possible, and its not hard to see why infographics can apply to these causes.  Where there’s someone willing to put up raw data, there’s someone else to synthesize it into an infographic of their own, and maybe even one more person to host it on their website for all the world to see.  By the time that graphic gets to you, there’s a lot of people you as the viewer have to trust, if you’re going to take their synthesis seriously.

Formal education on visual information and graphics most always involves the work of Edward R. Tufte, a world renowned statistician, professor and author (and hater of PowerPoint).  One of the most popular terms he has coined in criticism of contemporary info-graphics is the pervasive use of “chartjunk” which employs unnecessary embellishments to infographics that distract the viewer and take away the main things a graphic should be made up of: the information to be synthesized, and the graphic representation of it.

Good Magazine produces a series of incredibly popular infographics both in print and on their website.  However popular, they often employ chartjunk embellishments in an effort to walk the line between eye-candy and staggaringly simply explanations of complex data sets.  For example their infograph titled Transparency, Which Countries Eat the Most Meat employs mysterious gradients to already complicated iconographic equations on the right.

Here the gradient on the right could be taken as a practical element denoting special focus as part of the information synthesis, not just a decorative element.

Now, distracting visual information isn’t the only thing that can hamper a graphic’s effectiveness or even validity.  Statistical mistakes can also lead the viewer to draw confusing or conflicting conclusions from an infograph.  One good and recent example is a home-grown graphic depicting newspaper circulation over the past 20 years. Moving past the incremental construction, that makes the graphic almost impossible to read in one look (without scrolling), the graphic misses one key sample.  USA Today, the most popular newspaper in the United States was left of the list, the creators reasoning:

(We excluded USA Today, because we don’t care about it. If you’re in a hotel? You’re reading it now. That’s nice.)

Taking into account that USA Today is a newspaper, is national, and does operate in all the distribution channels as the New York Times and others included, this is an unnecessary omission that takes context away from the representation of similar newspapers’ decline.  Had USA Today been included, it would have been very timely, as it was recently reported a huge loss in circulation putting them slightly below 1.88 million readers.

I know what you’re thinking: “why, that would be right under the Wall Street Journal on this graphic… I wouldn’t have ever thought that the WSJ would be the most popular newspaper in America!” Well, that’s because it isn’t. The WSJ is hovering around 2 million subscribers because, as the graph notes, they are the only data set which includes online.  The graphic after the year 2003 is pretty much useless for the Wall Street Journal because those are the only numbers that include their paid web accounts.

These are just a simple few points about web infographics.  In DIY design, there are many mistakes to be made through the course of executing what one wants to do, but unlike designing your own t-shirt, your mistakes are viewable to the entire connected world with web infographics (in the Newspaper Circulation Graph’s case, even liked by 614 people on digg).  And, which the points listed here are just a few, the topic of synthesizing information in visual representations is a large field where there is much to learn.  If your interested in making your own infographs, whether you are a designer or just a design lover, then I’d suggest exploring some of the theory that’s out there.  And even if you’re just a viewer, don’t get fooled by someones shoddy amateur statistical analysis, educate yourself a little.

Joe Rotondi

Originally from New York, Joe is a student at American University in DC studying Graphic Design and Marketing. You can follow him on his blog and twitter.

Welcome to the inaugural DC Designers Blog post. What better way to start a new blog than to give away awesome stuff!

That’s right, below we’ll tell you how to enter to win the Periodic Table of Typefaces in your format choice of either a massive vinyl wall sticker or a print with T-shirt.

But first, we want to introduce the blog.

What’s this blog about?

The DC Designers blog is a place for the DC design community to grow, inspire, and share thoughts and work. We’ll be interviewing local designers, typophiles, artists and creatives; spotlighting work from our Flickr pool, posting about events we’re having (coming soon), sharing resources we and other DCDs have created (such as that growing list of local designers and firms on the right) and much more!

If you want to make suggestions, contribute links or write a guest post, please feel free to drop us a line at dcdesignersblog@gmail.com. Of course, you call also tweet us on Twitter.

Just tell me how I can win already!!!

Alright, entering to win the Periodic Table of Typefaces shwag is pretty easy.

STEP #1 Make sure you are following us on Twitter.

STEP #2 Tweet out the message:

Win a FREE Periodic Table of Typefaces wall sticker or tshirt+print! Details: http://ow.ly/vLhc (via @dcdesigners) #dcdpt

between now and the deadline on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 11:59PM EST. (To open a page with the message already ready to send, click here.)

STEP #3 Comment on this post with your Twitter name, a link(s) to your portfolio site, AIGA/Behance/Carbonmade/Squarespace or other online design profile and/or Flickr if you have one. (We’ll use this for the Local Designer list). Also make sure to use a valid email where asked (no SPAM, promise).

The winner will be chosen at random and announced sometime on Wednesday November 4th, 2009. You can retweet (RT) this message as many times as you want, but please only comment once. The winner will be contacted with details on how to claim their prize via email and Twitter direct message (so make sure you are following us for real).

So let the games begin and GET TWEETING!

So what’s the prize again?

The Periodic Table of Typefaces, designed by Camdon Wilde. It’s pretty awesome and sure makes for some sweet wall eye candy.

For the prize, we are giving away a choice between two packages:

One Vinyl Wall Sticker from Scribble on Everything

This would sure looks sweet in an office or studio. (It also comes in Cyan and Red.)

OR

One T-Shirt AND One Poster Print of your choice
The poster comes in two flavors:

Silver ink on hefty 80lb black cover stock

Silver ink on White 80lb cover stock

You can get a shirt with: Helvetica, Bodoni, Akzidenz-Grotesk, Garamond, Gill Sans, Frutiger, Trinité, Clarendon, and Gotham; and you might even be able to request one if SOE feels nice.

So what are you waiting for? Tweet it already!

In the meantime, follow us on Twitter here.