Infographics is very popular today. Everybody knows that it’s aim is to present complex information in a clear way, and good infographics must tall a story. Nevertheless I think that infographics is much, much more than that, it’s a training ground for future visualization tools.

First of all, infographics invents new types of graphs and mechanisms of visualization. The main difference with other fields of knowledge is that they set the lowest priority to visualization. Infographics designers tries to produce unique and attractive product. They try to be different, what is great (many variants of problem solve are always better than one), because it leads to increasing of visualization tools diversity.

Secondly, infographics popularize design and visualization. Modern trend is to actively use colors, types, icons and proximity principles in interfaces. One of the main reasons of that is cool infographics. Moreover, such graphs as: Bubble race, Concept map, Polar grid, Spiral, Treemap and others, became popular because of beautiful infographics. Actually, attractive infographics inspires like futuristic interfaces from moves, except that infographics creation is much cheaper than filming.

Thirdly, infographics is a pioneer of a Big Data visualization. Everybody knows that amounts of data are exponentially growing, that is why Big Data will be one of the biggest and the most important trends in the current century, but one of the largest challenges in this sphere is data visualization: huge amounts of data and extremely complicated structures of information. Only infographers already met this problem before. 150 years ago they solved it by hands; modern infographers solve it with R, Processing, D3.js and other tools.