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little bit and start treating them as mere space-fillers when no photograph
USA Today, the paradigm of “visual newspaper”. The
very famous weather page, designed by George Rorick,
inaugurated a new era of visual journalism. Information
graphics were transformed into something else after it,
something much more visually sophisticated and interesting
than they had never been before.
Visual Information
CHAPTER 1
The Elements of Infographics
What information graphics are and are not
T
he best way to understand what infographics are is to define what they are not. And the
only way we can do that is if we take a look at the recent history of this not-so-young
discipline.
It is commonplace among scholars and professionals alike to believe that news information
graphics, in their modern form, were born with the launch of USA Today in 1982. News graphics
have been published since the dawn of journalism a few centuries ago, but infographics as we know
them today originated with the concurrence of the new daily, the popularization of powerful (at
the time) and user-friendly personal computers, and the first illustration software. The visionary
ideals of Allen Neuharth, head of the Gannett newspaper chain, which owns the USA Today,
shaped the personality of the new daily and helped set its goal: to provide a summarized, colorful
and quick overview to everyday news.
The enemy to beat (or to resist) today by print newspapers seems to be the Internet, but in the
80s, it was the television. Many market studies done prior to the launch of USA Today proved that
readers were more and more attracted by good visuals and short packets of information, rather
than by the one-page or two-page in-depth stories that were common in dailies at that time.
USA Today was a newspaper organized in a revolutionary way: it displayed short stories and it
used color coding in its pages. Its use of design and pictures was bold. Among many academics in
Europe, USA Today is known as the first “post-television” newspaper. Its critics dismissed it as the
“McPaper”, as they believed it did no good for journalism, but was more the scan-me-quickly-
and-throw-me-away kind of daily. Its funny, by the way, that the best history of USA Today is titled
The Making of McPaper (St. Martin’s Press, 1989).
Information graphics played a key role in the McPaper revolution: they were intended to
condense big amounts of information in a small space. This is a goal that we still hold today, as
it is obvious that there is not better way to display large sets of data than with a good statistical
chart, or to provide geographical context to a story than with a map. USA Today was crucial for
the evolution of information graphics, and all who are in this business today are in debt to those
pioneers who, according to the newspaper’s biography, worked 16-hour shifts for months in order
to get the newspaper ready for release.
The great goals defined by USA Today creators had two unintended downsides that became
evident in the next twenty years. The first one is that it is really easy to unconsciously cross
the boundary between being concise and being simplistic. And, related to that: if we consider
infographics as devices for making pages more attractive it is easy to sweep down the slope a
Visual Information 23
is available. When other newspapers worldwide followed the lessons taught
by USA Today, many of them crossed those boundaries. Visually uneducated
editors and managers understood infographics as mere decoration, not as
devices to enhance the comprehension of information.
It is enough to look at some academic articles to notice that the “Big 80s
Mistake” is still alive and kicking to this day. Many academic articles still
refer to infographics as tools to make stories more “appealing,” “attractive,”
that argue that infographics should be used to “simplify” the information and
make it more “accesible” or, my dreadful favorite, that they can make stories
look “lighter.” Peter Sullivan (1987) wrote about how upset he felt when
he found this statement in a respected journal on typography: “tables and
graphics in newspapers (are) intended to make life easier for those who find
more than three sentences of continuous prose too much for them.”
Many information graphics artists became enthusiastic supporters of this
notion of infographics because in the 80s and 90s, it gave them a weapon to
fight for more real estate on the increasingly expensive newspaper page. The
mantra spread: give me more room, said the infographics people, I will make
the story look great and the reader will waste less time unraveling it.
What this concept forgot in the first place is that in the infographics
business, appeal is a by-product of well-organized information. Second: it
is true that a good chart can summarize tons of figures and display them in
an ordered and meaningful way, but that vision of infographics misses the big
picture: it is also true that a chart should not be necessarily easy to read. There
are cases in which this is not a realistic or desirable goal. I truly believe that
the time has come to change the paradigm of how we really understand visual
displays of news.
To “simplify” in every single case is an insidious goal because it sounds
so reasonable. The problem is that it downgrades infographics if its applied
with too much zeal because the main purpose of infographics is neither to
just increase the visual appeal of a story nor to just make the statistical or
geographical information related to it easier to grasp. On the contrary, it is to
show facts that would not be tellable otherwise. Should they also look good?
Sure. But that is a secondary issue.
On an abstract level, an information graphic is an aid to thinking and
understanding. This is an idea that I will explain in depth in Chapter 2. An
infographic is a tool to make the chaotic comprehensible, but not by just
stripping the story of unrelevant details or facts. Infographics are devices to
make the story more precise, more scientific, if we use that word in its colloquial
sense. Infographics should not contribute to the lack of depth of current news
coverage that has done so much harm to the credibility of journalism.
The statistical chart on this page illustrates this idea. The main consequence
of the 2006 midterm elections in the US was that both Congress and the
Senate fell under Democratic control. There was a big transfer of votes from
Republican to Democrats. The electorate had shifted. The goal of the main
infographic published by the The New York Times in the special supplement
about the election was to address this fact, and the solution was to make that
shift visually evident.
The central piece of this infographic represents how the vote changed in
every district with a line. At the tip of each line there is an arrowhead that
shows the direction of the shift. The longer the line, the larger the shift. Most
lines are pointing to the left (leaning Democrat) and those districts that gave
a new seat to the Democrats (28 total) are highlighted with a thicker blue
line and identified by their numbers. The districts are organized from the
top to the bottom depending on whether they supported Democrats (top) or
Republicans (bottom) in the previous election. The big shift: at the tip of each little line there’s a small arrowhead that indicates how votes were
Why do I think this standalone piece (it did not “complement” any transferred. Most counties voted more Democrat than in the previous election. © The New York
article) is so successful? It is not easy to read. In fact, it requires effort to be Times. Reproduced with permission.