Infographics: creative presentation of statistics

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management,  March, 1989  by Ed Joras

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Infographics: Creative presentation of statistics

Magazine editors go to great lengths to get that exclusive information or that insightful analysis that none of their competitors are going to carry. and most do a good job of putting well-known facts into a distinctive perspective. But few publications do much with the presentation of their information. This is particularly true of business publications, which live and die by the strength of the statistical information they give readers.

The meat of most business stories is numbers: increasing sales of an innovative product, decreasing revenues for an industry leader, static profits despite rising sales, and so forth. All in all, a great deal of effort is spent obtaining, reporting and interpreting the base numbers, but little thought is given to how the reader will gain the most, with the least amount of effort, from the data.

Numbers by themselves are essentially meaningless. By itself, the number 451 has no intrinsic significance. Before it can be interpreted, more information must be added. It must have a context, such as dollars, baseball batting averages or units of temperature.

It takes effort on the reader's part to derive concrete facts from the numbers and words presented in a text. This difficulty multiplies as we get into more complex numbers: Housing starts in Lake County rose 50 percent last year to 1,200, up from 800 the previous year. That 1986 figure was an increase of 33 percent over the 1985 figure of 600 housing starts, which itself was up 50 percent over 1984's 400 starts. In 1984, housing starts increased 33 percent over the 1983 figure of 300.

What's going on here? Once you slog through the text, it becomes apparent that you and I missed the boat by not getting into the housing business in 1983. But how long did it take you to figure that out?

There must be better ways to present that kind of information. One format option is a simple table. This breakout attracts the reader's attention and emphasizes the importance of the numbers. However, the numbers are still just numbers. The reader must digest the whole chart and establish the relationships between the numbers.

A better choice is a simple graphic representation such as a bar chart. At a glance, it's clear there is some kind of trend at work here, and that something is increasing at a great rate. The separate bars communicate the passage of time, and the change in size from one bar to the next illustrates the change in size of whatever it is we're measuring. But that's it. The reader must read the text to determine that more houses are being built each year.

The best choice is the informational graphic. It's immediately clear that we're talking about houses, and that more of them are available every year. The reader gets that message much faster than with any other presentation.

The downside of informational graphics is that they take more of our time to prepare. We must retype numbers gleaned from a press release or an annual report. It takes thought, time, effort and monetary investment to present an informational graphic. Just a few short years ago, that time and effort was prohibitively costly for most magazines. An in-house graphic would have required a trained artist using pencils, pens, calculators, pasteboards, stat cameras and a typesetter over the space of several hours, or even days.

Not as difficult as it was

With new technology, specifically desktop publishing, informational graphics are getting easier to produce all the time. A graphic such as the housing chart can be produced by a reasonably proficient artist, using a relatively inexpensive microcomputer, in about an hour.

Our example was produced with an Apple Macintosh running Cricket-Graph, from Cricket Software, and Illustrator 88 from Adobe Systems. Cricket Graph generated the bar chart and Illustrator was used to rotate the type, draw the original house, duplicate it and stack the duplictes. The graphic also could have been done with an IBM PC-compatible system.

Of course, these machines don't produce these charts by themselves. Similarly, the computer needs professional help in the form of an informational graphic artist. This person, possibly a graphic artist already on staff, must understand numbers and be able to relate them to the reader in a graphic form. The graphic reporter must also get help from the rest of the editorial staff in the form of direction from the editors and tips from writers and reporters.

Your infographics artist can't be expected to work in a vacuum. Like anything else on any publication, good graphics are a result of a team effort. The artist must know how to distill a feature article down to its most pertinent facts. Reporters, writers and editors must recognize opportunities for graphics when they stumble on them, just as they should have their eyes open for photo opportunities.

High-level management commitments

Effective use of informational graphics also requires high-level management commitments. Obviously, the monetary commitment for equipment, supplies and training is the first hurdle. A good graphics system can cost from $5,000 to $15,000.