Edward Tufte is a statistician, author, lecturer and graphic design legend.
His seminal work, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is considered by many to be the go-to book on data visualization and has been described by Amazon.com as no less than one of the ”best 100 books of the 20th century”.
Pick it up. If you’re a visual design nerd like myself, it’s gorgeously fascinating.
So it was a pleasant surprise to hear that last week, Tufte was charged by the Obama Administration to help communicate and visualize the progress of the $787 billion stimulus program. (For more on the appointment, Newsweek has the scoop.)
Not only is this great news for fans of Tufte but it also bodes well for the advancement and acceptance of the art of the information graphic (infographic) as well.
It’s about time.
Simply put, the art of the infographic lies in taking complex information and communicating it visually in a quick and easy fashion. It’s easier said than done. But when done right the results can be stunning.
Here are some of my favorite examples of recent infographics. (Click on any of the thumbnails to view the image at a larger scale)
Real estate strikes me as a particularly rich untapped vein for the infographic.
Within companies of all sizes data twiddles its thumbs waiting, wanting, hoping to be exposed to the world. The number of agents, numbers of homes sold, percentage of closings vs. listings, selling price vs. listing price… you get the picture.
So why not take a cue from Edward Tufte (“the Galileo of graphics”) and do something beautiful with all that data. It doesn’t take much. You need the data, the vision and a designer to render it.
It’s easy to tell the world how different you are. It’s not that hard to express it by licensing some data rendered into pie charts and graphs to illustrate it. But to turn data into something beautiful and meaningful – art – speak volumes.
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Nice. Tufte has provided inspiration to myself and many others slogging away at the dark arts of data viz. Real estate has an embarrasment of riches with data but relatively inelegant tools for analyzing it. Good things are coming in this arena, I predict.
Have you ever seen this Annual Feltron Report thing? (http://bit.ly/5DXouz) It takes awhile to load but it’s pretty sweet.
Jeff – Love the Feltron report. One of the examples I cited in the post is from the most recent version. It’s definitely part of what got me thinking on this whole subject.
Oh duh. Should have looked closer at your images.
Is there a service to help us do this task?
Adam–The greater part of the value in information design is that it is used to tell a narrative and make things clearer. As a result, it’s not as simple as grabbing some numbers and putting them into a chart.
To use information design as a point of marketing differentiation you would want to first start by figuring out which narratives are being told by the data. From there it’s a matter of making it clear and getting out of the way. The services of skilled designer would be useful.
Further inspiration re: the narrative of data can be found in Hans Rosling:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html
Foursquare’s personal stats page, reachable from the website after login rather than over a mobile device, states at the bottom of the page that the layout is inspired by the Feltron report. They do a pretty good job of mocking up basic Feltronian diagrams. At least it pleases me to have a monthly and weekly look at my own life in Feltron Lite. I only wish they had a “Complete” or “Annual” tab I could see, too. Maybe that will come when I hit my one year anniversary on Foursquare. One can hope. Or one can build such a perfect beast by oneself from the full history of check-ins supplied by Foursquare (including time of check-in and who you were with at the time of the check-in). This kind of data, and the potential visualizations built from it, is damn near heaven to me.
Joel, very nice examples. The book sounds beautiful. And, it’s great to see you contributing on the 1000watt consulting team! -Peter
Visual is always better. Any easy to use tools to input data and choose visually stunning charts&graphs?
[...] you are like me (an admitted fan of the infographic) and a visual learner, I found this image particularly helpful in putting it all in perspective. [...]