Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design

Introduction

I have always loved data.

The data could be huge spreadsheets of numbers, quantitative research data, business processes, demographics, financial results, map locations, or web statistics. It didn't matter—I loved it all.

After hours of working with a data set in a spreadsheet or database, I could see patterns and make interesting discoveries from the numbers. However, nobody else wanted to review the spreadsheet in that detail. They didn't want to see the data; they just wanted to understand the conclusions. That's when I embraced data visualization and infographics design.

If I could put a large number of data points onto one page, I could make it easier for the audience to understand how they all compared. People could look at one data point and understand how it fit into the context of the whole data set. Much later, I learned about studies and research that support the power of data visualization, but at the time I saw for myself that for most audiences, seeing is believing. If I could visualize the data, audiences could understand the information.

Working in marketing and product development departments for several consumer product companies, I was mining these visualizations as inspiration to create visual designs with my own data. I needed to walk the audience through a sequence of information so that it would understand how I was reaching my conclusions; I ...