Whatever happened to infographics? For a short time, infographics were all the rage in marketing circles.
Infographics were good at conveying information in a pleasing visual format, but they were also somewhat more sinister and manipulative.
By definition infographics have a bias and they tend to oversimplify complex information.
There were infographics on creating good infographics, there were tools, there were rules and of course there were templates.
People became skilled at writing and designing infographics.
Unfortunately, infographics became so ubiquitous they started to lose any meaning. The quality of the information declined and the concept became stale.
While I guess infographics are still being produced, they represent some of the worst elements of information conveyance. Cherry picked information, misleading statistics and graphics with a one dimensional narrative.
Information is so much richer than our systems are able to represent. The tabular nature of digital information makes it to easy to miss important context.
Infographics show information in a richer format but don’t really add any dimensionality to the data.
While the use of infographics may have declined, the process of culling and curating information into simpler and simpler chunks is still a lasting challenge.
