I see this many times a week when ‘infographics’ are shared on social media.

This was shared on LinkedIn recently..what’s missing?

What’s missing is the data, in a visual way. Too much time has been spent on producing the nice icons (which are important for context), making them stand out in white on a dark blue background and the text is white as well. The tile of the graphic is ‘Number of years it took for each product to reach 50 million users’ – so where is are the number of years? They are written numerically, which is ok, but are a smaller font size and produce in a lighter blue on a dark blue background.

The graphic is hiding the data, the important piece of the graphic. That data should be seen first, or at least, seen easily. So why hide it.

Infographic = information + graphic

Here’s the data produced in a visual form. IMHO a much neater way of seeing what the graphic is supposed to be showing.

The icons can be added to it to give context if needed, but the graphic should show the information (data) first.

24 January 2018