Animated Infographics — Just a Click Away!
Automatically turning a static infographic into a dynamic one.
Infographics use visual elements such as graphics and text to easily convey complex information. Further, designers can use animations in infographics to guide viewers’ attention and convey a narrative. Unfortunately, the process of adding animation to infographics is taxing. Researchers from Microsoft Research and Nanjing University, created the tool Infomotion to tackle this problem. This article shares their journey of automating the demanding task of generating animation for Infographics.
The full author team on this work included Y. Wang, Y. Gao, R. Huang, W. Cui, H. Zhang, and D. Zhang. We will use Wang to refer to the team throughout this article.
Animation is Hard
Creating aesthetic and compelling animations for infographics involves multiple steps. Designers need to carefully plan the timings and effects of each element. Moreover, infographics are composed of hundreds of visual elements, which makes the process more time-consuming. For people without an animation background, it gets even harder. Unlike experts, they lack a clear animation design in mind before starting. Also, they struggle with the complicated tooling used for animation.
Even though creating static infographics is well-researched, animating visualizations or infographics is understudied. Wang set out to solve this interesting problem for both experts and non-experts alike. To do this, Wang started by understanding the problem space.
Breaking down Infographics
Wang collected a set of 200 animated infographics from the internet and studied them. They identified the general components into which an infographic can be broken down. We will use the following infographic to understand each of those components:
1. Repeating Units: A group of visual elements, that is repeated in the infographic. In the figure, (j) is an example of a repeating unit. It’s composed of other smaller visual elements such as icons and text. It's one of the 4 identical units repeated in the infographic.
2. Element Group: Semantically similar elements belonging to different repeating units. In the figure, (i) the home icon, the castle icon, the building icon, and the city icon present across different repeating units form an element group.
3. Connector: Lines, arrows in the infographic that convey the connections and reading order of the infographic. In figure, (e) is an example.
4. Other Semantic Tags: Titles, footnotes, etc. In the figure, (a) and (c) are examples.
5. Layout of Repeating Units: The layout of repeating units also defines the reading order of the infographic. Wang found out 4 ways in which units are generally laid out — a) linear, b) radial, c) zigzag, and d) freeform (not laid in a regular pattern)
Breaking down Animations
Wang et al. also studied the set of animated infographics for classifying animation styles. Common animation effects on visual elements included fade, float, zoom, wipe, flying, and splitting. They found out that most infographic designers animate by repeating units and by element groups in three styles -
- One-by-one (86% of animations in the set): Groups or units are animated one by one.
- All-at-once (10% of animations in the set): Animations on all infographic components are shown at once.
- Staggering (4% of animations in the set): All components are animated starting at different times.
Creating the Tool
Wang created an algorithm that (1) decomposes visual elements in the infographic, (2) clusters similar elements, (3) identifies repeating units, and (4) figures out the layout and semantic tags. This way algorithm generates the information structure of the infographic.
Further, based on the study of animation in the dataset. Wang concluded that most of the animations were of one-by-one type. For the order in which units are animated, Wang provides options to animate elements based on (1) the indices (1–10 or A-Z) present in the infographics, (2) logical reading order e.g. left to right, top to bottom, and (3) semantic tags, where initially title and footnotes are animated followed by other things.
The type of effect for animation such as fade, wipe is recommended by a model that was trained on the infographics dataset.
Dear Humans, I Hope You Like It
Wang recruited 32 participants to study the efficiency of Infomotion. Participants were shown animations for 18 infographics. For each infographic, they were shown two versions:
- Designer-crafted animation.
- Machine-generated animation.
In 13 out of 18 tests, participants showed no preference for designer-crafted over machine-generated. When participants were told half of them were machine-generated, one of them said “[it is hard] hard to imagine they are generated with one click.”
Shortcomings
Infomotion has some shortcomings that need to be addressed such as (a) it doesn’t work for freeform layouts, and (b) it fails when the repeating units are not similar enough. These failures can be addressed in further studies on the topic.
Wrapping Up
Despite its shortcomings, Infomotion is a powerful tool that can be used by experts and non-experts alike for animating infographics. Wang et al. proposed that Infomotion can be used as an add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint or a standalone application that connects to other authoring tools. Regardless, Infomotion is a great step in the direction of machine-generated infographic animation and will inspire other researchers to further study the area.
Reference
Wang, Y., Gao, Y., Huang, R., Cui, W., Zhang, H., & Zhang, D. (2021, June). Animated Presentation of Static Infographics with InfoMotion. In Computer Graphics Forum (Vol. 40, №3, pp. 507–518).
