Presto Electro

I love a good infographic. They look cool, they're educational, and they're huge time savers. A well designed infographic can illustrate a huge wealth of information at a glance. I've always felt that infographics were pretty neat, but I haven't had a good reason to mention them. Until now.

This semester, I'm taking Professional Presentations. The first chapter of the book has a lot of information about the history of presentations and graphics and colors and everything, but it also has some SWEET infographics. Check out this one:

If you are ever confronted with an upset dog, just turn to page 50 of Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and use this handy graph to figure out how the dog REALLY feels!

There are plenty of excellent charts and graphs in this book, but the examples of what NOT to do are so much more interesting than the proper ones. As a case in point, check out this graph of inclinations of planetary orbits from the Middle Ages:

Back then the sun bounced up and down at random, apparently! In the artist's defense, though, this is the oldest known example of a time-dependent plot. It didn't really catch on. The next example wasn't seen until 800 years later.

These days, we are SURROUNDED by information. A huge amount of data can be construed as relevant to any given topic, and it is easy to come away with even less of an understanding than you started with.

It takes a special kind of smarts to turn this intractable bulk of information into an image that is both easy-to-understand and easy-on-the-eyes.