Designing The News

Well I’m getting ready to disect a few pages of statistics and start creating a bunch of pictograms and infographics, and I did what’s probably going to be the last lot of research on the subject.

Destructive spending by liquisoft, via DeviantArt.

Our goal was to design a poster that informed the public of something. Our focus, for this project, was to do something related to government missile spending and how it effects us taxpayers.

The 42 Below Vodka campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi NY uses pictograms to various stories involving vodka. It took the gold award in the Clio Awards 2008.

An interactive infographic from the New York Times on how to drain the excess water brought in by hurricane Katrina.

A PDF infographic of what happened when hurricane Katrina hit.

An interactive map of the damage caused by hurricane Katrina.

The history of life on earth displayed in large format posters.

The webtrends map takes the subway map approach to map out popular online applications.

Bioshock as some really great infographics on their plasmid instruction videos, along with some rather excellent old school drawing styles.

Looking around ‘teh interwebs’ for more infographic examples, I was extremely impressed by the quality and range in the portfolio of 10create.

USA Today loves it’s interactive infographics, and here’s another example.

A beautiful timeline from the BBC explaining British history using interactive infographics.

Explore all of British history, from the Neolithic to the present day, with this easy-to-use interactive timeline. Browse hundreds of key events and discover how the past has shaped the world we live in today.

Since we’re on coffee here, I highly reccomend Douwe Egberts Continental, dark or gold, both are delicious! For me it’s the best coffee in the world, beating that of the coffee shops!

These have to be my favourite infographics. Simple, solid, and they’re about something I love! I also have a copy of these I printed out and pinned on my wall.

An excellent infographic which takes the data you input, and maps out an estimated cost/savings plan on whether or not you should buy or rent.

Edward Tufte’s book, Envisioning Information, is an excellent read and I highly recommend it.

Edward Tufte shows his appreciation for the work of Megan Jaegerman on his website where he breaks down and analyses some of the infographics.

Businessweek maps out user interactivity online using large size coloured pixels.

More animated infographics

Did you know 2.0 uses simple graphics, tells the story of our current situation.

This video shows us an interview with a police sheriff talking about the infographics printed in an American newspaper regarding inaccuracies in the story about a shooting.

Dirt Party Research video shows some pretty good infographics mashup with some 80s cheese thrown in for good measure!

Content, Life & Everything makes a few near future predictions, with some smooth looking animations.

Airport tells the story of a day in a mans life using only airport infographics/pictograms.

This mini documentary tells the story of Sputniks’ launch into orbit.

In the film ‘Stranger Than Fiction’ Will Ferrall’s character thinks alot about the mundane, and in the film this is illustrated by some really nice infographics. I couldn’t find a clip of the opening titles (which is full of infographics) but I did find this music video which someone has put together.

Finally we come to Royksopp, and their video for Remind Me. Beautiful, and a pretty good song too.

And the ever updated notable list

• The USA Today infographic archive.
• Nixlog’s September 11th infographics list.
• New York Times’ The Wealthiest Americans Ever.
• The Flickr Infographic pool: Hundreds of beautiful examples.
• Operation Christmas Infographic - PDF

That’s it for now I guess. If anyone has any input or they know of any infographics examples that should be on this list let me know. Otherwise I have a presentation to prepare for on Thursday now so I don’t think I’ll be posting any more until Friday. That, plus an impending dissertation deadline means I have a busy christmas ahead.