Unit 5 Reading

In the "Do's and Don'ts of Infographic Design" article talks about how infographic has become a strong design trait and a powerful tool to visualize massive amount of data over the years. Designing infographics takes a certain way of thinking to grasp onto the concept, not the same way as your typical brochure, website, etc. The first rule it represent is "Show don't tell" and a technique it suggests is keeping all text in one layer of the AI file then to turn it off to see if the whole design still makes sense with out the text layer visible. The second rule is that don't just use boring excel charts only, make it more visually appealing. Although typography has it uses it shouldn't be the main focus of the infographic design. The last few bits of the article are tell the story, visualizing the hook, think outside the box, wireframing the design, universal, and use a 3-color palate.

"10 Challenges Facing Information Design Today" is about how the author observed information design and came down with 10 challenges which include overproduction, misunderstanding, undervalue, fragmentation, scarcity, amnesia, misappropriation, commercialization, commodification, and de-humanization. I agree with the overproduction being theres a lot out there and when I try to find inspiration I don't always come across a good one. I somewhat disagree with the scarcity due to I am enrolled in a class that studies vastly on information design.

"Today In Horrible Infographics: 5 Keys to Creating Successful Infographics" the article first starts out with a bad example of infographic that features 5 key points; storify, visualize, simplify, timelessness and shareable. Although I don't think "storify" is an actual word but I guess I can understand them to kind of rhyme with simplify. The author was able to redo the design of the bad example into something that is clear and simple with a beginning middle and end.

A political campaign data visualization
http://blog.visual.ly/politics-and-visualization/

Resources for infographic and data visualization
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/11/25-useful-data-visualization-and-infographics-resources/