The Rise, Fall and Possible Renaissance of the Infographic

BRITTON

Published in

Design + Creating

6 min readMar 12, 2015

Data Is in the Eye of the Beholder

By Steve Penhollow

Like most things we try to accomplish with visuals these days, the infographic (defined by Visual.ly as “deep data presented as visual shorthand”) has its roots in cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Josh Washington includes both cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphs in his history of information technology on the Matador Network, despite the fact that a caveman’s idea of technology involved throwing a rock, and his idea of information involved painting on one.

Brag about your wearable tech if you must, but never forget that the caveman accomplished more than you ever will with his nonwearable rock.

The Rise of a Graphic Medium

However, Visual.ly’s true father of the infographic is Yale University professor Edward Tufte.

It was in 1975, while teaching at Princeton, that Tufte “developed a seminar on statistical graphics with John Tukey, a pioneer in the field of information design. Tufte later self-published Visual Displayin 1982, establishing himself as an infographics expert,” wrote Visual.ly.

In a short PBS documentary called The Art of Data Visualization, Tufte was quoted as saying, “In the arrangement of the visualization, every single pixel should testify directly to content.”

“Style and aesthetics cannot rescue failed content,” Tufte continued. “If the words aren’t truthful, the finest … typography won’t turn lies into truths. There are enormously beautiful visualizations, but it’s as a byproduct of the truth and the goodness of the information.”

Citing the history of cartography and Galileo’s scientific engravings, Tufte said, “The history of visualizing data is very substantially a history of science.”

“Anyone who is great at SEO knows that the shortcuts are few and far between. The key for content marketers is to up our game where infographics are concerned.”

Long before the advent of the personal computer and computer-aided design, infographics were widely used in newspapers to help readers grasp information as quickly as possible.

In the early 1980s, USA Today was widely criticized by newspaper traditionalists for its infographic-heavy design. At the time, newspaper traditionalism was seen as a more viable business philosophy than was infographic heaviness.

We know better now, or most of us do.

Chartjunk?

However, USA Today gave rise to something that still spoils the infographical ideal today, something Tufte dubbed “chartjunk.”

“Chartjunk,” writes designer Sealth Reinhold on his home page, “is what happens when your data design focuses too much on the design aspect.”

Tufte used “chartjunk” to refer to what he believed were unnecessary design elements, sometimes employed to hide a “thin data set.”

Many designers took (and still take) issue with Tufte’s draconian definition of “chartjunk,” but it is indisputable that there are plenty of junky charts out there that spoil things for everybody.

“Too many people had jumped on the infographics bandwagon. Blogs and websites became flooded with infographics, and readers got bored.”

In an article on Slate, Will Oremus explained why the “democratization of infographics” (which is to say, the wide availability of cheap and easy-to-use tools for creating them) was a terrible happening.

“The proliferation of build-your-own-infographic tools,” he wrote, “has led to a deluge of hideous charts, graphs, and lists … that have so befouled the concept of the infographic that it may be years before it fully recovers.

“Many are utterly pointless. Others are simply inane, applying bar charts and pie charts seemingly at random to answer questions that no one was asking in the first place. Still others are so bewildering as to make one yearn for a good old block of text instead.

“But to me, the most galling of all are those that imply some sort of relationship or equivalence between a bunch of numbers that have almost nothing to do with one another. These infographics aren’t merely a crime against aesthetics, they’re a crime against statistics and an affront to rationality itself. In many cases, they leave you with a poorer understanding of the topic at hand than you possessed before you read them.”

The Demise of a Graphic Medium

In the summer of 2014, KISSmetrics co-founder Neil Patel wondered whether the infographics on the site were doing as smashingly well as they’d done in 2010.

As it turned out, they weren’t.

“As you can see from the KISSmetrics data,” Patel wrote, “infographics still drive traffic but not as much as they used to. After 2012, infographics weren’t providing the same results as before. One of the main reasons for the poorer ROI was their rise in popularity. More and more companies started leveraging them, which made them more common.”

Social Caffeine went so far in 2014 as to declare infographics dead.

“Too many people had jumped on the infographics bandwagon,” Social Caffeine wrote. “Blogs and websites became flooded with infographics, and readers got bored. On top of that, ‘infographics’ became a magic button for creating web traffic. If you wanted to go viral, so the logic went, all you had to do was create an infographic and ‘boom!’ Quality didn’t matter. Your data sources didn’t matter. As long as you had an infographic, you were golden.

“Infographics (to put it in the words of Zazzle’s Kenny Van Sittert) ‘became spammy.’ They were ‘quickly scraped together by some overseas designers or interns who [had] little design experience.’ And so blog readers began to ‘treat them with a kind of contempt usually reserved for discarded chewing gum.’”

“In the arrangement of the visualization, every single pixel should testify directly to content.”

But are infographics truly dead? Being that the dream of every technology pundit is to be able to claim that he or she was the first to declare something dead, such claims should always be taken with a byte or brontobyte of salt.

As Britton’s infographic about infographics amply demonstrates, there is plenty of data to suggest that it would take a lot more than a veritable biblical plague of bad infographics to kill the infographics medium.

Martin Waiguny, an advertising lecturer at AUT University in New Zealand, wrote in an email that a good infographic still has a great deal of power.

“We know from cognitive psychology that our visual sense is very strong,” he wrote. “Studies have shown that information is better comprehended if people get a visual representation rather than just text.”

Quick comprehension is not the same as high cognitive engagement, however.

“There are still narrative stories that do better,” he wrote.

Still, in today’s multiscreen, short-attention-span environment, Waiguny believes that the ability of a good infographic to tell a story quickly should not be shortchanged.

The Slippery Slope of Enlightenment

In a Visual.ly blog post from late 2014, Jess Bachman wrote that the harm done by bad infographics should serve as a lesson that “you get what you pay for.”

“The interest in infographics has flooded the market with producers and products,” Bachman wrote. “You can get them for $5 or even free using automated tools. … This is what separates those using infographics as a tactic and those using them as a strategy.”

Noting that visuals still “increase the retention of information [and] are more likely to be shared than written content,” Bachman wrote that the people who design and utilize infographics are currently on a “Slope of Enlightenment.”

“The Slope of Enlightenment ahead of us is paved with best practices and quality content,” he wrote. “And anyone who is great at SEO knows that the shortcuts are few and far between. The key for content marketers is to up our game where infographics are concerned.”

The history of marketing on the Internet seems to be a history largely characterized by marketers coming to understand that shortcuts don’t work.

Bachman wrote that “the shortcutters are hopping off the hype cycle” as they always do, so there is “an opportunity for those doing it right.”

“Infographics for both audiences and producers have matured,” he wrote. “It’s the major leagues now and if you aren’t willing to put the effort in to do something right, you might as well not step up to the plate at all. If you need an out-of-house designer, then get one. You can’t just take a swing with a list of facts anymore either. Audiences want stories and narratives, and you might need a journalist to help craft or refine it.”

Storytelling is one of our strengths. So is design. Below is our “the History of Infographics” Infographic.