Thinking Visually

Celebrate the spaces between

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Let your ideas breathe…

How Can You Harness the Power of White Space?

Objects in a composition need to breathe. White space offers an airy canvas stage on which the parts of your design can freely dance. Just ask Mark Boulton, graphic designer and writer from the UK. Here’s my favorite part about Mark’s view on white space:

“Whitespace is often used to create a balanced, harmonious layout. One that just “feels” right. It can also take the reader on a journey through the design in the same way a photographer leaves “looking room” in a portrait shot by positioning the subject off the center of the frame and having them looking into the remaining space.”

Check out this slide show by Brand Autopsy to see some compelling use of white space.

Now, how can you use white space in your next design, web page, slide deck or thank you note to make a bold statement?

Looking forward to [the spaces between] your ideas,

 

Susan Hendrich

Communicating data with Infographics

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Infographics: Pictures That Tell A Story…

What is an Infographic?

The term Infographic is a portmanteau of two terms, “Information” and “Graphics,” and describes the visual representation of data. Infographics help communicate complex information in a digestible manner, as they creatively present data in an understandable and engaging format.

from www.DesignModo.comAs web users, with our diminishing attention spans, we’re inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly colored messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.  Here are some examples to fire up your i-graph engines…

Example: An Infographic that’s all about YOU

Intel’s “What About Me?”

Intel’s What About Me? is an automatic infographic generator that connects to your own Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts to create a profile infographic about you.

Social media users know that discovery is half the fun. With What about Me? you can capture a snapshot of your social media life and create your own colorful image, full of clues and facts about one of the most fascinating subjects in the world — YOU!

The chipmaker’s new “What About Me?” app culls info from your Facebook, Twitter and YouTube profiles to crank out a data visualization of your composite social media profile.

For instance, there’s a graphic that looks like a flower that tracks your interests based on what you tweet and write status updates about. There’s also a record of your most popular post ever and your most popular pic, your ratio of self-created updates vs. found information and “likes.”

More great Infographic examples

Free Online Tools For Creating Infographics

  • Hohli

    Hohli is an intuitive, simple online chart maker. It’s incredibly easy to pick your chart type, add some data, vary the sizes and colors and see the finished chart.

    information graphics

    Creately

    Creately lets you design easy-to-make diagrams and flow charts. You can choose from a number of purpose-designed diagram types and quickly add your data to make your own chart. The end result looks very professional.

    information graphics

    New York Times

    New York Times’ Visualization Lab lets you use statistics from recent NYTimes articles to create visualizations in various formats. You can also see other people’s visualizations and see how other people choose to display the same data.

    data graphics

    Many Eyes

    Many Eyes lets you upload your own data or use data already stored on the site. The visualizations themselves are well-designed and very professional-looking. This is definitely the easiest way to use your own data for online visualizations.

    data graphics

    Google Public Data

    Google Public Data lets you easily take public data and transform it into an infographic of your choice. These beautiful, colorful graphics simplify and communicate the data perfectly.

    data graphics

    Wordle

    You may have seen my earlier post on Wordle, which lets you create word visualizations using text you enter. There are plenty of interesting designs to choose from. Enter whole books, short passages or see what other people have used. In this example, we can see the US constitution visualised.

    Free Software For Creating Infographics

    Tableau

    Tableau is a free Windows-only software for creating visualizations. As you can see, these impressive graphs are colorful and quite unique.

Great tutorials on infographic creation:

Totally Drawsome

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Draw on Your Creativity…

This ingenious little app is taking the cooliverse to new levels of fun.

Your Turn

Now, I’m asking for your help in an informal survey. If you’re playing Draw Something, please add a comment below that summarizes why it’s so much fun.

Can Facebook Predict Future Job Performance? – Talent Management magazine

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Facebook Prediction of Future Job Performance Trumps Traditional Personality Assessments…

Wow. What a statement!

If this Northern Illinois University study is correct, and Facebook is a better barometer of a candidate’s potential job performance than traditional personality assessments, what does that mean for hiring managers? Do we simply spend five to 10 minutes perusing candidates’ Facebook profiles to predict future job performance?

Can Facebook Predict Future Job Performance? – Talent Management magazine.

And, what does YOUR Facebook profile say about your chances for success in your next role?

Puts a whole new perspective on that comment you made on the game last night, eh?

Pinteresting

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Design. Design. Design…

It’s the secret behind the success of Pinterest.

Check out Sahil Lavingia’s perspective on the design genius behind wildly popular stuff-sharing phenomenon, Pinterest: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669189/pinterests-founding-designer-shares-his-dead-simple-design-philosophy  

The bottom line?

Design isn’t just wire frames or visual style; it’s about the product as a whole.

Here’s my favorite part:

“…Design should be considered a facet of everything you do, as well as a means of improving your business. Imagine if your site were to slow down. What would you do? You’d try to make it faster, or find an engineer that could. You’d make a conscious design decision to make your site quicker to use, because you understand that doing so will make your offerings more accessible and user-friendly. Apply that principle of improvement to everything else.”

Lavingia is the designer/founder/CEO of Gumroad, and was previously on the founding team of Pinterest.