The pro­lif­er­a­tion of info­graph­ics online is help­ing to make a broad, some­what sta­tis­ti­cally illit­er­ate, audi­ence aware of impor­tant data and trends.

For those design­ing these info­graph­ics, there­fore, there is a need that they under­stand their process intimately–from data col­lec­tion to illustration–in order to analyse it hon­estly and with meaning.

Through a “show­case of bad info­graph­ics”, Smash­ing Mag­a­zine lam­basts the trend of inap­pro­pri­ate infor­graph­ics and offers an inter­est­ing essay on why design­ers need to be sta­tis­ti­cally lit­er­ate.

The impor­tance of sta­tis­ti­cal lit­er­acy in the Inter­net age is clear, but the con­cept is not exclu­sive to design­ers. I’d like to focus on it because design­ers must con­sider it in a way that most peo­ple do not have to: sta­tis­ti­cal lit­er­acy is more than learn­ing the laws of sta­tis­tics; it is about rep­re­sen­ta­tions that the human mind can under­stand and remember.

As a designer, you get to choose those rep­re­sen­ta­tions. Most of the time this is a pos­i­tive aspect. Visual rep­re­sen­ta­tions allow you to quickly sum­ma­rize a data set or make con­nec­tions that might be dif­fi­cult to per­ceive oth­er­wise. Unfor­tu­nately, design­ers too often for­get that data exists for more than enter­tain­ment or aes­thet­ics. If you design a visu­al­iza­tion before cor­rectly under­stand­ing the data on which it is based, you face the very real risk of sum­ma­riz­ing incor­rectly, pro­duc­ing faulty insights, or oth­er­wise man­gling the process of dis­sem­i­nat­ing knowl­edge. If you do this to your audi­ence, then you have vio­lated an expec­ta­tion of sin­gu­lar impor­tance for any con­tent cre­ator: their expec­ta­tion that you actu­ally know what you’re talk­ing about.

The two rules of info­graphic production:

  1. If it would lead to the wrong con­clu­sions, not pre­sent­ing the data at all would be better.
  2. Your project isn’t ready to be released into the wild if you’ve spent more time choos­ing a font than choos­ing your data.

via @Foomandoonian

I am reminded of this tangentially-related info­graphic tem­plate from Flow­ing­Data.