A recipe for infographics

Posted on May 24, 2007 by Melissa Worden

“Why don’t editors and publishers get it?” asks Alberto Cairo about newspapers making creative visual storytelling online.

Cairo is the former director of online infographics at the award-winning elmundo.es and current assistant professor of infographics and graphic design at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

And he has posted on his Web site a copy of his how-to article “The future is now,” published in the SND’s winter 2005 Design Journal. I just found the link via Desiree Perry’s del.icio.us bookmarks, but it’s obviously been around for awhile.

Cairo writes:

“Newsrooms have undterstood multimedia only as a multiple media: text, audio, video, animation and interactivity are used, yes, but separately, not in integrated storytelling pieces. I think that one of our golas is to learn how to combine all the tools the Internet offers and use them to enhance the reader’s experience.”

And he continues (emphasis below is mine):

“In print you deal with space. In online you deal with space and time because you can sequence the action. This means that you are not constrained by a physical frame anymore. This give you freedom, as you can offer as much information as you wish, but it is also risky: TOO MUCH INFORMATION IS NOT INFORMATION, SO BE CAREFUL. Keep the balance between providing context and what your journalistic criterion tells you about what the limits are.”

(Mindy McAdams also has made the above point many times.)

Unfortunately, I don’t think much has changed with online infographics since then. But it’s encouraging to see that he’s teaching students about the importance of it all.

Aside from the fact that, ironically, this explainer is a copy of a print story about making interactive explainers, this is a great resource to print out and hand out to your print graphics department and print editors.

Comments

One Response to “A recipe for infographics”

Angela Grant on May 25th, 2007 12:38 pm

I agree with that. Many infographics just make me think too damn much, and I begin to question my intelligence. We had some like that on our site this week.

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