Danielle has been an information graphic artist for about 3 years now and is currently working for Portfolio (before that she has been at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal).
Some things to keep in mind when making visual representations of data:
- if you can take something away and the meaning isn't altered, simpler is usually better
- BUT make sure it's still understandable - you might want to show it to other people and see if they are reading it properly (since often it becomes hard to see it objectively after working on it a long time)
- if it's not chart-able, don't force it
- think about the point. what do you want people who read the graphic to come away with? you want your charts to be accurate and well-reported but you also don't want to lose sight of your main objective.
Some Resources/Info-Graphic Artists:
Edward Tufte - diagram guru; charts of the academic, info-heavy persuasion. makes fun of overuse of icons. has also written several books on the theory/practice of designing infographics
John Grimwade
Alberto Cairo
Nicholas Felton (see examples a couple posts back)
Ben Fry
Nigel Holmes
Catalog Tree
New York Times Multimedia Index - Amanda Cox
eg: How Different Groups Spend Their Day
Also - Processing.org is a computer programming tool for making infographics
And the book Data Flow was mentioned again - more on the info-light side of infographics.
Thanks again to Danielle for taking the time to come talk to us and to Michelle for setting it up!
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