Week 9: Interactive Infographics

Infographics are a great way to communicate information quickly and effectively to an intended audience.  But, in today's day and age, it is becoming harder and harder to tell a story and actually grab people's attention long enough for them to listen to the story.  This is where interactive infographics are so beneficial.  They allow the viewer to dive deeper into the infographic.  They can physically click on things which allows them to connect with the information more.  Also, it is much easier to tell a story with interactive infographics.  Rather than just throwing a whole page of information at the viewer and hoping that they are attracted to the right parts at the right time to understand the story is one difficult task as we have learned over the past few weeks.  Interactive infographics allow the viewer to take in only small pieces of information at a time in whatever order the writer intends, allowing for a much easier story follow.

I looked through the Wall Street Journal as well as the New York Times and I found a lot of great infographics in the articles but none of them were interactive.  I would highly recommend looking through newspapers on a daily basis to find examples of infographics and start getting ideas.  It is also just a great way to keep updated on what is happening in the world today.  Here is one example of an amazing interactive infographic that I found in the Guardian.  This infographic shows some of the major contemporary world issues today and it shows how much the people in each country are afraid of all of these issues.  The infographic allows the viewer to scroll over each country and see what percentage of people said they were afraid of each issue.  Some of the statistics are really interesting and I encourage you to go check it out!

This week, I have also created another infographic.  It is not interactive, but it does tell as story.  I tried to use the arrows to give the viewer a clear path to follow.  This is not a perfect example as it is not interactive.  I do not have the resources or the knowledge to create anything of that nature yet.  So far, I have only used Canva, Powerpoint, and Piktochart.  This time I still used Powerpoint, but I downloaded Hubspot and used one of their templates to create my infographic.  It is based upon an article from the Wall Street Journal titled, Study Links Eggs to Higher Cholesterol and Risk of Heart Disease.  I found the Hubspot template to be rather helpful.  It was definitely much easier than just starting with nothing in powerpoint, but I still found it very difficult to manipulate pictures, objects, and words to get them to do and look exactly how I wanted them to.  I still found it rather difficult to use and I think it took way too much time to create this very simply infographic using Hubspot and Powerpoint.  Here is an image of the infographic and I have also added a link in case the graphic is blurry.