Kosara wants to rescue infographics

Robert Kosara takes us back to the 1940s, and an incredible "infographics" project by the Lawrence Livermoore Laboratory. (link) Here is one of the designs:

Kosara laments:

When did information graphics turn into ‘infographics,’ and when did we lose the meticulous, well-researched, information-rich graphics for the sad waste of pixels that calls itself infographic today?

I think one of the key missing pieces is analytics. Most of today's infographics seemingly are a result of treating data as flowers to be arranged. There is little analytical thinking behind what the data mean. Incidentally, that is why the new NYU certificate is not called Certificate in Data Visualization--we wanted to emphasize the importance of analytics next to datavis.

Also, we have an elective designed for people interested in content marketing. The Livermoore Lab project would fall into this category. So do annual reports for corporations, fundraising prospectuses for non-profit organizations, magazines whether commercial or membership, content for web marketing, etc.

*** The other problem is a kind of perversion of measurement. Because so much of this stuff is online, so many pieces are judged by click rates or bounce rates or time on page. The problem with click rates is well known. Headlines of so many online articles are written solely to create clicks. It's gotten to the point that we feel duped by the headlines.

The design may have originated in print, but in all likelihood, it is also uploaded to the Web; the interaction of readers with the online version is much easier to track than the effect of print, leading to the lazy generalization that the Web response would be "similar to" the print response. This is one of my pet peeves: bad data is worse than no data.