Stop Already With The Stupid ‘Infographics’

Over the last year, the explosion of these abominations called “infographics” has gotten overwhelming. The number of design-deficient morons making these is so ridiculous that you can fill an island with them. I’d do that. And then nuke it.

The fact is that these monstrosities are not infographics. These atrocities are crimes against good taste and everything that infographics really should be. They’re just a bunch of statistics jammed together on horrible vertical pages, bloated with bad drawings and clipart created by primitive monkeys using CorelDRAW! 1.0 — graphical disgraces that most often disguise spam, commissioned by iniquitous companies looking to increase traffic to their sites.

And they should be stopped at once.

So what are good infographics, you ask? Here are some examples highlighted by the master of information display Edward Tufte. These infographics — look at the example above — were created by Megan Jaegerman for the New York Times.

Compare Jaegerman’s elegant work with the usual horrors invading Twitter, Facebook and blogs everywhere. In Jagerman’s infographics, you get actual information from the graphic. Not just big numbers on a page. The graphic itself helps you understand the complexity of the subject that she’s illustrating. That’s the objective. And not only she achieves that objective, but does it elegantly. She makes it all fun and engaging too.

So now that we have established what is good and what is crap, can we stop with the latter and try to get more of the former? Thanks. [VisualLoop via Twitter]