The Velocity infographic challenge

Everybody’s doing infographics these days. And we are, too.

The one thousand share challenge.

Have you noticed? There is an infographic boom. Everybody wants one these days. They’ve become a staple of content marketing. And that’s no surprise, really: in a wordy environment of whitepapers and ebooks

• They are visually appealing and usually don’t make you read too much (Phew!)
• They’re super-shareable
• And like the best of content marketing, they hold the promise of valuable independent insight – or at least some kind of hard data. B2B techies Most people like that kind of thing.*

So, of course, we love them at Velocity (what you see in the header is our demographics, by the way). We’ve got shelves full of beautiful books with some really good examples. (We also see loads of really-not-so-good examples out there, all the time). We’ve done quite a few ourselves – and every time we’re at it, we realize that they’re a lot harder to create than those beautiful examples suggest. In fact, they’re bloody hard to get right.

This lack of infographic nonchalance bugs us, because we think it’s a great format that can be a lot of fun. Most beautiful things are, right? That’s one reason we want to crack them. And also because we’re facing the fact that infographics are part of this age of big data and the visualization boom that goes along with it. They’re here to stay.

So we’ve got loads of questions about them, like:

• What makes an infographic?
• How do you best set out creating one?
• Is it the same as data visualization?
• If it moved, would it still be an infographic?
• Can you make jokes in them?
• How good are open-source visualization tools (and can’t they just do our job)?

We do wonder.

The plan, and the challenge

So, as soon as Jim and Joel have settled the question which way a book spine should read (only a duel will solve it, I’m afraid), and Ollie’s learned some German words that are actually useful, we’re going to experiment and think about and play around with a few nodes of data (and other stuff).
The idea is simple, really. We want to:

• Learn as much about infographics as possible
• Share stuff we love
• Find out why we love it
• Deduce a principle or two
• Get to talk to (and maybe work with) some of the great practitioners of the infographic
• Have some fun and create some nice work of our own. Work that gets shared. In fact, we want to create an infographic that gets one thousand shares. 1000.

That’s the challenge. Stay tuned to watch us succeed, or fail miserably.

*Not all infographics deliver on the promise, though. Some just look like they’ve got data cred. Like when I put on those horn-rimmed glasses and still suck at math.