Information Graphics Books Pdf File
Celena Holtzberg
The infographics presented are rather heavy on data. There can be a case of too much information in an infographic. Some are rather complex, and most definitely drawn with the help of computer programming. While they can look spectacular, I'm not sure if readers will be overwhelmed by the complexity and skip reading it. So we are unable to know whether they are effective or not. The accompanying text just provides information on what the infographics is about but not the thought process that goes behind.
The examples are from a huge variety of publications, mainly magazines and websites. I'm actually hoping for more newspaper infographics but there aren't a lot compared to other forms of publication, but you can get The Best of Newspaper Design books for that.
Our main interest in bringing together this collection was to show the variety of contexts, in which information visualisation is used. The book provides examples from the media and journalism as well as from the realm of science and education, but also features several independent art works or satirical diagrams.
For structuring this wealth of material, we picked up a concept introduced by Richard S. Wurman: LATCH. According to Wurman, there are only five ways to order information systematically: by location, by alphabet, by time, by category or by hierarchy.
Infographics (a clipped compound of "information" and "graphics") are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly.[1][2] They can improve cognition by using graphics to enhance the human visual system's ability to see patterns and trends.[3][4] Similar pursuits are information visualization, data visualization, statistical graphics, information design, or information architecture.[2] Infographics have evolved in recent years to be for mass communication, and thus are designed with fewer assumptions about the readers' knowledge base than other types of visualizations.[5] Isotypes are an early example of infographics conveying information quickly and easily to the masses.[6]
Infographics have been around for many years and recently the increase of the number of easy-to-use, free tools have made the creation of infographics available to a large segment of the population. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have also allowed for individual infographics to be spread among many people around the world. Infographics are widely used in the age of short attention span.[citation needed]
In newspapers, infographics are commonly used to show the weather, as well as maps, site plans, and graphs for summaries of data. Some books are almost entirely made up of information graphics, such as David Macaulay's The Way Things Work. The Snapshots in USA Today are also an example of simple infographics used to convey news and current events.[7]
Modern maps, especially route maps for transit systems, use infographic techniques to integrate a variety of information, such as the conceptual layout of the transit network, transfer points, and local landmarks. Public transportation maps, such as those for the Washington Metro and the London Underground map, are well-known infographics. Public places such as transit terminals usually have some sort of integrated "signage system" with standardized icons and stylized maps.
In 1626, Christoph Scheiner published the Rosa Ursina sive Sol, a book that revealed his research about the rotation of the sun. Infographics appeared in the form of illustrations demonstrating the Sun's rotation patterns.[9]
In 1857, English nurse Florence Nightingale used information graphics to persuade Queen Victoria to improve conditions in military hospitals. The principal one she used was the Coxcomb chart, a combination of stacked bar and pie charts, depicting the number and causes of deaths during each month of the Crimean War.
1861 saw the release of an influential information graphic on the subject of Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow. The graphic's creator, Charles Joseph Minard, captured four different changing variables that contributed to Napoleon's downfall in a single two-dimensional image: the army's direction as they traveled, the location the troops passed through, the size of the army as troops died from hunger and wounds, and the freezing temperatures they experienced.
The Cologne Progressives developed an aesthetic approach to art that focused on communicating information.[19] Gerd Arntz, Peter Alma and Augustin Tschinkel, all participants in this movement were recruited by Otto Neurath for the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum, where they developed the Vienna Method from 1926 to 1934. Here simple images were used to represent data in a structured way. Following the victory of Austrofascism in the Austrian Civil War, the team moved to the Netherlands where they continued their work rebranding it Isotypes (International System of Typographic Picture Education). The method was also applied by IZOSTAT (ИЗОСТАТ) in the Soviet Union.
In 1942 Isidore Isou published the Lettrist manifesto, a document covering art, culture, poetry, film, and political theory. The included works also called metagraphics and hypergraphics, are a synthesis of writing and visual art.
In 1972 and 1973, respectively, the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft included on their vessels the Pioneer Plaques, a pair of gold-anodized aluminum plaques, each featuring a pictorial message. The pictorial messages included nude male and female figures as well as symbols that were intended to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. The images were designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and were unique in that their graphical meanings were to be understandable to extraterrestrial beings, who would have no conception of human language.
The infographics created by Peter Sullivan for The Sunday Times in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were some of the key factors in encouraging newspapers to use more infographics. Sullivan is also one of the few authors who have written about information graphics in newspapers. Likewise, the staff artists at USA Today, the United States newspaper that debuted in 1982, established the goal of using graphics to make information easier to comprehend. However, the paper has received criticism for oversimplifying news stories and for creating infographics that some find emphasizes entertainment over content and data. Tufte coined the term chartjunk to refer to graphics that are visually appealing to the point of losing the information contained within them.
With vector graphics and raster graphics becoming ubiquitous in computing in the 21st century, data visualizations have been applied to commonly used computer systems, including desktop publishing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
Likewise, television began to incorporate infographics into the viewers' experiences in the early 2000s. One example of infographics usage in television and in pop culture is the 2002 music video by the Norwegian musicians of Röyksopp, for their song "Remind Me." The video was composed entirely of animated infographics.[25] Similarly, in 2004, a television commercial for the French nuclear technology company Areva used animated infographics as an advertising tactic. Both of these videos and the attention they received have conveyed to other fields the potential value of using information graphics to describe complex information efficiently.
The field of journalism has also incorporated and applied information graphics to news stories. For stories that intend to include text, images, and graphics, the system called the maestro concept allows entire newsrooms to collaborate and organize a story to successfully incorporate all components. Across many newsrooms, this teamwork-integrated system is applied to improve time management. The maestro system is designed to improve the presentation of stories for busy readers of media. Many news-based websites have also used interactive information graphics in which the user can extract information on a subject as they explore the graphic.
Many businesses use infographics as a medium for communicating with and attracting potential customers.[27] Information graphics are a form of content marketing[28] and have become a tool for internet marketers and companies to create content that others will link to, thus possibly boosting a company's reputation and online presence.[29]
Religious denominations have also started using infographics. For example, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has made numerous infographics to help people learn about their faith, missionaries, temples, lay ministry, and family history efforts.[30]
Infographics are finding a home in the classroom as well. Courses that teach students to create their own infographics using a variety of tools may encourage engagement in the classroom and may lead to a better understanding of the concepts they are mapping onto the graphics.[citation needed]
With the popularity of social media, infographics have become popular, often as static images or simple web interfaces, covering any number of topics. Such infographics are often shared between users of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Reddit. The hashtag #infographic was tweeted 56,765 times in March 2012 and at its peak 3,365 times in a span of 24 hours.[citation needed]
Infographics are effective because of their visual element. Humans receive input from all five of their senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste), but they receive significantly more information from vision than any of the other four.[32] Fifty percent of the human brain is dedicated to visual functions, and images are processed faster than text. The brain processes pictures all at once, but processes text in a linear fashion, meaning it takes much longer to obtain information from text.[2] Entire business processes or industry sectors can be made relevant to a new audience through a guidance design technique that leads the eye. The page may link to a complete report, but the infographic primes the reader making the subject-matter more accessible.[33] Online trends, such as the increasingly short attention span of Internet users, has also contributed to the increasing popularity and effectiveness of infographics.[citation needed]
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