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Infographics and Visualizations as Tools

For the Mind
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Alberto Cairo
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published on September 5, 2012 in Design

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Alberto Cairo teaches infographics and visualization at the University of Miami. He Visually + ScribbleLive: The Future
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taught at UNC-Chapel Hill between 2005 and 2009, and has been director of
infographics at El Mundo online, in Spain, and at Época magazine, in Brazil. He is author 16 Tools Every Social Media
of “The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization.” Manager Should Use

Designing an infographic or a data visualization is an act of engineering. Does this Keys for Giving Effective Feedback
idea sound strange to you? Sometimes it does when I present it in lectures and to Creatives
classes. Many people tend to think that I am indulging in some sort of vague game of
metaphors, but I am not. I say it quite literally. I believe that an infographic is a tool in Must-Read Reports for Online
Marketers
a very similar way that hammers, saws, and screwdrivers are tools: They are
instruments we devise and build to extend our capacities beyond their natural limits, 2015 B2B Marketing Trends That
to accomplish feats that would be extremely dif cult — or even impossible — if tried Might Have Passed You By
without their aid. We humans are natural-born cyborgs. We are used to getting raw
materials from the environment (whether that’s iron and wood, or information and
data) and giving them shapes that are adapted to certain goals or tasks. CATEGORIES
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Think about it this way: Tools are not always actual objects designed to help us with
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physical activities. A notebook, whether it is a Moleskine or an Evernote digital
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document, is a tool that expands our memory. A digital calculator, whether it is an Social Media Storytelling
inexpensive machine bought in the nearest Dollar Tree or an app downloaded to your Tools Updates
iPhone, frees you from the burden of having to retain and execute many complex Video Visual Content
mathematical algorithms. Non-physical tools (or sets of tools and practices), such as Visualization

statistics and the scienti c method, evolved to let us gaze beyond what we would
normally see, and to overcome our deepest biases and lazy habits of mind. The same SEARCH OUR BLOG
is true for great visual displays of information.
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Take Dr. John Snow’s classic map and Voronoi diagram of the 1854 cholera outbreak
in London, which is among my favorite examples of information design because of its
spartan ef ciency. Snow designed his masterpiece not as a mere presentation of data,
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but as a visual argument for empirical inquiry and scienti c discussion. He wanted to
show the evidence for the relationship between two variables: the likelihood of dying
of cholera and the distance between the places where victims lived and a source of
water contaminated by Vibrio cholerae bacteria. As expected, and with a few
exceptions that Snow investigated thoroughly, the closer a building was to the
deleterious Broad Street water pump (at the center of the map), the more victims
were recorded. The shorter the distance, the higher the toll.

Learn about data visualization tools.

For details about how this map was designed, Read Steven Johnson’s book “The Ghost
Map” or this Wikipedia article.
 
Try to imagine these data presented in tabular form. The numbers, names of victims,
addresses, etc., that Snow collected during his research would be useless, as the
patterns of clustering would remain hidden behind the intersections of columns and
rows. Patterns became noticeable only when they were arranged in a way the human
brain could understand. Snow’s famous cholera map is a tool for analysis and
intellectual debate the same way that a scatter plot is a conceptual tool to study
correlations (or lack thereof) in data sets, a bar chart is a tool to compare values with
precision, and a choropleth map is a tool to perceive the relative incidence of
phenomena in an area. Good graphics are not just displays you can extract
information from, but devices to explore information with.
Moving to present times, I suggest you navigate this recent interactive graphic by The
New York Times about how droughts affect crop production. The effective
combination of stacked area charts, maps, and tables, offers an excellent overview of
the multivariate data and many possibilities to play with. The information is organized
in a way that lets you relate the regions where crop production is more abundant
with those that suffer the most because of sparse rains. The richness and depth of
this interactive presentation would be hard to achieve with other forms of encoding,
such as mere copy, or a table.

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http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/24/us/drought-crops.html
 
The notion that infographics and visualizations are conceptual technologies is
applicable not only to quantitative data graphics, but also to explanatory diagrams
and illustrations. Fernando Baptista’s rendering of the Basilica of the Holy Family
(Sagrada Familia, below), published by National Geographic magazine, is a nice
example. This painstaking portrait of the building invites readers to delve into the
information and discover unexpected details. When I interviewed Fernando and Juan
Velasco, graphics director at NGM, for The Functional Art, they told me that their
illustrations are data visualizations, in a sense: “They are not just nice-looking
drawings, but accurate depictions of reality with thousands of very precise data
points”. NGM infographics are gorgeous, but that is a secondary component of their
quality. They are, above all, accurate: Every single detail is double-checked and
reviewed by experts; every line, patch, and shade of color has a meaning and a
function. Their drawings are ef cient. Almost nothing in them is gratuitous.

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by NatGeo.Learn about data visualization software.

 
The principle that infographics and data visualizations must be thought of as tools
can be useful, but it also has consequences that some designers simply ignore. The
most important one is that it forces you to stop thinking just as an artist, and to start
acting like some sort of craftsman. You are a professional whose main goal is to
design devices to make people’s lives easier, not just to entertain them, or to sell them
an idea or a product. You must care rst about structure, precision, integrity, depth,
and functionality. Only then you can think about decoration — if decoration is
necessary at all — or a particular visual style based on typefaces or color palettes.
This doesn’t mean that infographics should not be beautiful. Quite the contrary, if we
want to attract readers and make them feel interested in relevant issues. Aesthetics
and elegance are crucial. But if your aesthetic choices get in the way of the
information, if they obscure your message or take away too much space that could
have been used to better tell your story, you will be in trouble. Arguably, your
“infographic” or “visualization” will not deserve to be labeled as such.
 
Alberto’s book came out recently and can be ordered on Amazon. He has also made the
rst chapter and the John Grimwade, and Steve Duenes and Xaquín G.V. interviews
available for download.

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