Thanks to Allister Frost for this link to 40 Useful and Creative Infographics.
Sometimes a picture is worth way more than 1,000 words. Writers need to remember this. I worked on an article for Wired and my research ended up at about 30,000 words or something. Their graphic design department shrunk it to a two-page diagram. You can see the result in my earlier article Diagrams: everything is connected to everything else.
I particularly like this diagram that talks about how a product or service is perceived. Very useful for marketing folk like me. But the whole list of 40 is worth studying.
Related posts:
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hmm. Perhaps it’s because I’m very left-brained and verbal (rather than visual), but I find diagrams like this a messy and really hard to decipher. I know it wasn’t possible in this instance, but I think I’d rather have read a 30,000-word thesis!
I often see diagrams in client brochures and presentations that I think have made a simple topic more complex. But perhaps they work for more right-brained, visual people, who don’t find it so hard to make connections that are associative, rather than logical?
That’s interesting Clare. I’m a bit of a lazy reader because I have to read so much stuff all the time. This is why I like a good diagram. It’s a meal in a pill. But thinking about the Wired article, I wish they had published it as text because it would have been a better credit for me. I never got a feature in Wired, only bits and pieces. This was supposed to be a longer piece but ended up as an infographic. It was the right decision for the piece and it looks great but from a purely career perspective it would have been better the other way, I think.
Anyhow, my journalist days are behind me now. I’m doing more and more PowerPoint presentations for clients and the need to encapsulate complicated information in an image or diagram is becoming a bigger part of my daily work. I’m increasingly an information engineer rather than a wordsmith. The first question to ask is ‘what’s the best way to get this information across to the target audience.’ Not ‘how many words is that.’
Thanks for sharing this information. This is an excellent collection of what I consider InfoPorn. For lazy readers, such as myself, this is a great way to present useful information and show relationships.
See also: http://www.yourwritingdept.com/blog/?p=339 Infoporn: Presenting raw data with visually stimulating graphs
Thanks,
Ron
Darn! I wish I could disagree but right before I came to this post I was looking at your twitter gallery and looking for me! (And there I was which pleased me way more than perhaps it should.)