41 GREAT (AND NOT SO GREAT)

INFOGRAPHICS

Such a simple concept that reveals so much complexity and meaning. This graphic isn’t rocket science, but it’s extremely well designed and tells the story wonderfully. Great execution.

1. The Mysterious Imagery of the Dollar Bill

If you’re a fan of data visualization projects, this one by Jay Carr is one of the best we’ve seen. Jay is a fantastic visual storyteller, and the way he handles the numbers here to help craft the story is a credit to his talent and experience in the information graphics industry.

2. Houston Weather Records

3. The Wall Street Journal’s Airline Profits infographic

An infographic shouldn’t be complicated. This one is a great example of stripping away unnecessary information and using only what’s needed to deliver the message. Simple and elegant with its color-coded breakdown of expenses based on the seat in the plane, it communicates this surprising story so very well.

4. The New York Time’s Hoping for an Upgrade Explainer

Sergio Peçanha does a masterful job incorporating lots of whimsy into this simple flow chart. The text is sassy with loads of cheeky humor, which goes perfectly with the minimalist icons scattered throughout the graphic.

5. USA Todays’ Manned Mission to Mars process graphic

This graphic does a wonderful job of simplifying a very complicated process. The use of icons and simple lines, along with flat shapes representing the planets and sun, explain what it would take to send astronauts to Mars in an easy-to-understand and approachable way.

6. The Illusion of Joey

First, Alberto Cuadra is one of our favorite graphic artists from the newspaper industry. His work at El Mundo, The Houston Chronicle (where he worked with Jay Carr…see graphic #2 in this list) and The Washington Post has been breathtaking in its frequency and scope. What we love about this graphic is that the hand-drawn approach really lends itself well to the tactile nature of the puppetry that makes the horse come to life.

7. Brown’s Town Game 8

Another hand-drawn infographic, this one produced by Chris Morris of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Chris does incredible caricatures that remind us of Al Hirschfeld’s work. Chris chooses a more cartoony rendering style here that does a great job of communicating technical and anecdotal points equally well.

8. The Hobbit

Ryan Huddle designed this layout that incorporates information graphic elements and editorial content for this ‘Movies’ page in The Boston Globe. There are so many little pieces and storytelling devices in this graphic, it’s hard to decide what we love most. The nice thing about this graphic is that you can get lost in it, but still enjoy every second of the time you spend with it.

9. The Ups and Downs of the San Diego Chargers

Matt Perry, of U-T San Diego, produced this wonderful data visualization summing up what the last few years have been like for the NFL’s San Diego Charger football franchise. Matt handles the statistics masterfully and allows them to tell the story without letting the graphic elements get in the way.

10. Understanding Artisan Gelato

There are a lot of sins in this infoposter, not the least of which is that it’s practically all big type and illustrations that do little to help push the story along. It’s eye candy with no real substance. The biggest issue, though, is that we don’t know where to begin reading. It’s just a jumble and mish mash of trivia slapped together with no hierarchy. It’s not memorable. It doesn’t communicate well. It’s just unappetizing.

11. The Hunters and the Hunted

Adolfo Arranz centers this incredible infographic for the South China Morning Post around a beautifully rendered illustration of a whale being pursued by a whaling ship. However, unlike the previous graphic in our list, this illustration is not only eye-catching, it also helps tell the story too. With callouts and cross-section diagrams each piece of art does its part to tell the story.

12. Super Moments of the Super Bowl

After seeing this infographic appear in The Boston Globe, and on our good friend and colleague Charles Apple’s visual journalism blog, we just had to post something about it at buzzmachinestudios.com as well. Luke Knox did a great job highlighting some of the most memorable Super Bowl moments from the past in a fun and entertaining way.

13. High-Bar Back Squat

Another artist whose work we’ve featured on our blog in the past is Ted Slampyak. Ted does a lot of retro/nostalgia pieces for a blog/podcast called the Art of Manliness. We love the old-school touches Ted uses in his work for AoM, like the halftone screens, wide-kerned typography and quirky additions like the strongman’s singlet and handlebar mustache. These storytelling devices help reinforce AoM’s brand, and also make Ted’s graphics a joy to read.

14. Under the Hill, the Other Side of the Water

Call us suckers for hand-drawn graphics if you want to, but using this technique can be a powerful storytelling device. As we saw in ‘The Illusion of Joey’ graphic by Alberto Cuadra, using hand-drawn artwork for an infographic can subtly add to the feeling of the message. In this example, the artists from Grupo Nacion did a magnificent job with the cutaway drawing of Bilbo Baggins’ hobbit hole. The fact that the illustration is hand drawn adds to the earthiness of Bilbo’s home, ‘Bag End.’

15. The History of the Olympics’ Summer Sports

This massive data visualization from The Times of Oman provides a complete history of the sporting events from the first modern Olympiad in Athens in 1896 up through the games in London in 2012. It’s a huge undertaking, but they told the story beautifully.

16. How to Make Cupcakes

This wonderfully simple recipe infographic makes the task of preparing and baking cupcakes look easy. The best part for us is the color-coded steps in the process tied to the ‘Time Spent’ chart on the left side of the graphic. It’s a subtle element that adds another layer of depth to this great infographic.

17. Moonwalking: Then and Now

Another graphic by Jay Carr and Alberto Cuadra when they worked together at the Houston Chronicle. We love seeing the side-by-side comparison of the 1969 technology NASA used then with the current/near-future technology of today’s space program. The 3D diorama renderings are the right choice for this high-tech piece, and the timeline across the bottom adds depth to the story.

18. Coca-Cola Bottling Process

This is one of our all-time favorite pieces from our own portfolio. It may be a little tacky to toot our own horn by including our work with these other great information graphics on this list, but with 100+ years of collective experience in producing infographics, eventually you have to hit one out of the park. The thing we love about this piece is how we were able to distill the complexity of the chaotic process that happens inside a function bottling facility into something a person can easily understand.

19. Brain Freeze explainer

Yes, this is another piece from our archives. It’s not the most complex graphic, but we love the whimsical touches that add to the story here. They pair wonderfully with the joy of eating ice cream and the pain/pleasure that comes with ‘brain freeze.’

20. Microsoft Cloud Computing

It looks pretty, but this is another example of a bad infographic. As with the previous bad example (#10 in this list), everything here is eye candy, and there’s no hierarchy to help drive the narrative. There should be a focal point to draw your eye to where the narrative begins, but all this graphic offers is a hodgepodge of visual gimmicks. And what’s with that big straw sticking through the ground?

21. Olympic Medal Pyramid

Here’s another fantastically executed data visualization infographic by the Times of Oman staff. This is a really innovative approach to the medal count graphics that are everywhere around the time of each Olympic games. The pyramid for each country is well designed and it’s loaded with several layers of information which makes this graphic that much better. Our only gripe – it looks like the ‘medal race’ line chart totals are swapped for the U.S. and China. D’oh!

22. Nokia Lumia 1020 Camera Phone

We love this graphic because it kind of has that technical drawing/exploded view vibe happening, but it’s handled in a fun and intriguing way. The pullout facts are also handled well, and are loaded with actual useful/helpful information.

23. Pan Am: Building on a Legacy

We did a blog post on this piece as well. It was produced by our own Bill Haas for a client who’d taken over some subsidiaries of Pan Am and was trying to revive the businesses. It’s a fantastic example of a timeline for a subject that has a rich and storied history.

24. 70th Anniversary of the Attack on Pearl Harbor

The thing we love most about this piece is how it tells its story in a relatively tight space. This version was built by Scott Brown for the Orange County Register’s website. If only all internet infographics in this format told their stories so well.

25. Star Wars Episode IV Plot Summary

When we saw this infographic by Wayne Dorrington a few years back we immediately saved a copy to our infographics morgue. We’re huge fans of summarizing plots to famous tales using sequential illustrations (see example #28 in this list), but stripping it down to simple icons with no text at all to explain things was a real challenge. However, it works well because the story is so familiar.

26. Star Wars Episode V (part 1) Plot Summary

Apparently Wayne Dorrington got such great response from his previous effort to summarize the plot of Star Wars that he decided to plunge ahead and produce another set of summaries for Empire Strikes Back. We’re glad he did because they’re excellent. See slide #27 for part 2.

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27. Star Wars Episode V (part 2) Plot Summary

28. Shakespeare’s Henry IV illustrated plot summary

How do you follow two great examples of plot summaries using icons? With a plot summary of your own, of course. We’ve been producing illustrated plot summaries for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its coverage of the Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis for nearly 15 years. It’s always so much fun to cover the event in this way, and it makes Shakespeare less intimidating and more accessible for scores of people who otherwise might pass up this wonderful event.

29. Sopranos

What makes this infographic so great is that while there is a lot of information being presented, it’s done in a very organized and easy-to-follow way with each season having its own section. What makes this infographic so fun? The death count for each episode is labeled with a small symbol and the rolling toll is calculated at the end of each season.

30. Wimbledon in Numbers

Does a grass texture for the background, some icons and big type make a good infographic? Uh….no.

31. Operation Holiday Magic

Our friends at The Villages Daily Sun created this piece to run in the paper on Christmas Eve 2014. It’s a fantastic piece that tries to theorize how Santa and his eight tiny reindeer are able to deliver Christmas cheer to millions of homes around the world in just 24 hours. Fun stuff, but I think we’ve seen this somewhere before… (see next example)

32. The Science of Santa

Wait a minute! Now I remember where I’ve seen that Santa Claus graphic from slide #31. We did practically the same piece on how Santa works his Christmas magic exactly 10 years before the Villages Daily Sun version came out. Well, I guess imitation IS the sincerest form of flattery. Actually, we do think both pieces have their own unique qualities, and they both prove that infographics don’t have to be entirely based on actual facts, though convincing some people that Santa isn’t a real guy is harder than you might believe.

33. Operation Holiday Magic

The Tremendousness Collective is partly comprised of a group of folks we used to work with a long time ago at XPLANE – perhaps the first information graphics consultancy. TTC produces lots of fun, attention-getting work, and while this piece is a little more tame than some of their other projects, it does a tremendous (pardon the pun) job of telling the story here. There are lots of subtle layers of information, but yet it’s clean with lots of whitespace to help provide some focus.

34. TIME magazine’s Health Hunt

We can’t even remember when this graphic was published by Time magazine. It’s probably close to 10 years old, but it’s a wonderful example of using 3D models to create a great visual explanation of how to shop healthy. We love the bird’s-eye view perspective the 3D camera gives you in this image. It makes everything clear and easy to follow, plus it has that fun Family Circus gimmick to it. Are we dating ourselves with that reference?

35. Thames Jubilee Pageant

We love this map-within-a-map infographic. Not only does this image highlight landmarks along the Thames River that people can watch the parade of boats from (as well as times the flotilla will passing those landmarks) but it also provides a map of the ships in the flotilla itself. Brilliant!

36. Tattoo Infographic

The best thing about this incredible infographic is the execution. It’s an amazing concept, and it demands that you read it. It’s so convincing you almost believe it’s an actual tattoo (it isn’t…we promise). This incredible piece was produced by Paul Marcinkowski as an art school project.

37. ‘Sno Problem

Javier Zarracina has produced some truly stunning infographics over the years. If you’re not familiar with his work, do yourself a favor and Google him. You won’t be sorry. The thing we love most about this piece is how Javier incorporated actual residents’ stories and anecdotes into the graphic. This is a wonderful storytelling tool that helps other readers identify with the issue.

38. Hurricane Hugo’s Havoc

If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Bill Pitzer, run to your web browser right now and do a Google search. Bill’s been creating extraordinary infographics for over 30 years. His Hurricane Hugo graphic presented here is chocked full of layer after layer of incredible information. He has a portfolio of work that is solid gold, and he gets too little credit for his amazing talent.

39. How Coffee Works

Dan Zettwoch is another former colleague from our days at XPLANE. Dan works incredibly fast and produces some of the most fun and compelling infographics we’ve ever seen. This infographic on growing, processing and consuming coffee is lively and entertaining, and it communicates the concept in an approachable way.

40. Adrenaline: Fight or Flight

Another piece from Dan Zettwoch that handles a pretty technical subject in a fun, lighthearted way, and most importantly communicates the concept effectively.

41. Facts About Facebook

This graphic is just a jumble of disjointed statistics, badly handled charts and a huge cityscape illustration on the left that does nothing to advance the message.

CONCLUSION

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Using an infographic will enable you to visually explain complex concepts or large sets of numbers in a way your reader will easily understand and remember. But, coming up with an infographic is like solving a puzzle: all the pieces must fit in just the right place for the picture to be clear.

We hope this Slideshare offered you some insight on deciphering the good from the bad when it comes to infographics and maybe helped you in deciding if this is the right route for the information or data you are trying to showcase.