Image via Wikipedia

Here is a sneak peek at a detailed post of mine  slated to appear next week published in Information Space.

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Unless you have been hiding under a rock or camped out in a Bhutanese monastery, I am sure you have noticed that information graphics and data visualizations are everywhere. There are sites dedicated to it, volumes of books detailing the process of it, and visualization tools for just about everything, everywhere you look. Social media. Your website. Your money. Whatever.

There are a ton of tools out there, but what does it take to pull off a successful visualization? Quite a few things, actually, but first, a quick overview of the differences between information graphics and data visualizations. Wait, they are not the same thing?

Not really.

An information graphic generally deals with answering and analyzing knowledge, whereas data visualization is typically a more complex examination of a set of statistics. Information graphics are, more often than not, created ‘by hand’ by an individual or a design team (using programs such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop). Data visualizations are typically created in an automatic fashion using software to generate the image (SAS or Tableau). An extreme example to contrast the two would be visualizing Girl Scout cookie sales with cookies (infographic) paired against business analytics (data visualization). Continued…