1. Info-Graphics:
From Concept to Reality
Warren Watson
Arizona State University
2012

2. Why Design?
• “Design is a tool to make things clear. It is
a lubricant for ideas. Poor design is like
crackling static on the radio.”
-- Jan White, author, teacher (1988)
• “Why design? It’s simple. We’re in a
vicious fistfight for people’s eyeballs
-- David Fowler, art director (1994)

5. Poor Design: ‘Crackling static’

7. The Role of the Designer
“Role of the designer
is to get the reader to
the first paragraph.”
-- Edwin Taylor

8. Thinking Visually
People appreciate the look of things before
the content itself. Some simple examples
showing the power of graphic thinking.

11. Why Use Informational Graphics
• To help make stories more understandable
• To give readers a sense of context
• To provide additional entry points on your
pages
• To “image” information; graphics make
sense of chaos, define the abstract
• To reveal data at different levels of detail

12. ‘Recognizable Form’
“The hardest job (for today’s journalist) is
getting information into a recognizable
form. In an age of quick information,
reading is knowing, but seeing is
believing.”
--- John Sculley, former chairman, Apple Computer

13. Combination
of Type and
Artwork
This form of
storytelling
combines photos
or illustrative
elements with
type. They
combine to tell a
story.

15. Practicing Journalism Whole
“Competing for the news will require us to
practice journalism whole. It means that
editors will widen the view of their work, so
that words, illustrations and page design
are thought of us as one, not apart, and
handled whole.”
--Gene Patterson, former editor and publisher,
St. Petersburg Times (1988)

16. Whole
Journalism
Heads,
photos,
graphics
working
in
unison

17. Photos to connote
reality; graphics,
stories, cutlines to
explain information

18. Getting the Reader to the 1st Graph
* Strong
head with
active verb
* Map
showing
epicenter
* Brief facts
about quake
over head
* Infographic
* Subhead
tells more of
story

19. Make Every Tool Count!

20. History: ‘How Newspapers
Evolved’

21. 1890: Evolving Toward Today

22. 1912-37: Getting Visual

23. 1945: Experimenting with
Design

24. 1961-86: Major Strides in Design

25. 1993: An All-
Photo Front Page
On a slow news
day, this
newspaper
created a page
with no stories.
Not a single
reader
complained!

26. USAT Pulls
It Together
Not the first in color,
not the first in
graphics, not the first
to package.
‘McPaper’ parlays
it all for first time.

27. Journalism Story Forms:
A Reminder from September 11

28. Photos Do the Best Job in
Communicating Reality ...

29. Emotion, Scale

30. Graphics Often Do the Best Job
in Explaining That Reality
The New York Times produced an
extraordinary body of work in informational
graphics around 9/11. Here is some of the
material.

32. ‘Help The Reader Understand’
“Too often, we rely on the narrative, the
30-inch story, as the only form of telling the
story, especially a complex one. But you
can tell your story using other tools -- a
graphic, a highlights box, a diagram -- and
help the reader understand the topic.”
--- Bryan Monroe, assistant managing editor, San
Jose Mercury News

33. The 5 Elements
of a Graphic
1) Headline
2) Explainer: A short
statement explaining
why the information is
important
3) Body: The
presentation of the data
4) Source line
5) Credit line

34. Kinds of Graphics:
What to Look For?
• A who story: Suggests a bio box
• A what story: Suggests a breakout of provisions
• A when story: Suggests a time line or schedule
• A where story: Suggests a map
• A why story: Suggests a pro/ con breakout
• A how story: Suggests a table, chart or diagram

36. ‘Information Anxiety’
“Good instruction is built on good
description. Words, pictures and numbers
-- use the right means to describe your
ends. Learning is remembering what you’re
interested in.”
-- Richard Wurman (1990) in book of the same name
(Book was recently updated)

37. Put It in Understandable Terms
• An acre is 45,568 square feet in area. Easy
to forget? Yes.
• An acre is also roughly the size of a football
field without the end zones
• This is a cure for information anxiety!

38. Graphic Description: Use in Writing
• To better understand the
enormity of the World
Trade Center disaster,
consider the sheer size of
the buildings.
• Each floor of the Twin
Towers contained
45,000 to 50,000 square
feet of office space.
Each floor was about the
size of a football field in

40. Locator
Map
Always effective
in creating
understanding.

41. Demystifying Charts and Tables:
Major Types
> Pie chart: Compares the parts that make up a whole,
often measuring money, population, percentages.
> Line or fever chart: Measures changing quantities
over time, plotting key statistics on a grid.
> Bar chart: Compares 2 or more items visually as
abstract bars or columns.
> Numerical table: Arranges data into columns so
readers can make precise, side-by-side comparisons.

42. Pie Charts: Strengths
A pie chart should
be used to
summarize statistics
in which the size of
the pieces relative
to the whole is
important. Note: A
pie of more than 6
slices can be
confusing. Consider
another form.

43. Fever Chart: Strengths
Fever charts plot pairs
of coordinates, usually
representing time and
quantity, on a grid and
then join those points
of form one
continuous line of
curve. Fevers should
not be used when data
varies too little.

44. Too little variation in
Poor Use the quantity line.

45. Organizing Information in Tab Form

47. Bar Charts
Bar charts
represent
numerical
values as
abstract bars or
columns. They
compare
amounts

48. Effective Way to Communicate
Lots of Information

49. Diagrams:
The Most
Difficult,
But Often
Most
Effective
Form

51. Having Some Fun With Graphics

54. Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity

55. Some Things to Avoid in
Graphics
• The inclination to create a pie chart, fever chart
or bar chart WITHOUT actual numbers
• Maps with a non-North/South orientation
• Mixed scales
• Distortion -- in the old USA Today weather
map, does Maine and the rest of New England
really have less weather than Florida?

56. When Not to Use a Graphic
• When the information is too obvious or too
simple
• When the story is too complicated
• When words say it better
• When there is no time to do the graphic well
• When you’re simply doing a graphic to get color
on the page
--- Source: Gerald Council, Los Angeles Times

58. A Reporter’s Guide to Graphics
• View graphics as sidebars -- sometimes they
illustrate your stories, sometimes they add
additional information, sometimes they carry the
so-called heavy cargo (numbers, complex data).
• What to look for:
--- Get all the numbers when reporting
--- Ask for the drawings, schematics
--- Bring back the map
--- Get phone numbers for followup
--- Go to the graphics specialist early

59. The Process: A Graphic Is Only
As Clear As Its Concept
• Decide what you want to say. Is the point
to show a trend, convey quantity, educate,
locate or explain?
• No graphic can be all things. Focus is
primary.
• Don’t compensate for unclear data by
packing in whatever data you can find.
• Create a graphic that will actually be useful.

60. The Process: Ideas
Someone in the newsroom should read
every story, scan every budget, and listen to
every news conversation with graphics in
mind. Could the graphic help the story by:
* Demonstrating a trend?
* Comparing size, cost?
* Locating the site?
* Showing how it happened?

61. Combination
Graphic
Includes line
graph, table and
bullet
information to
tell the story.

62. The Process: Research
• Information drives effective graphics
• Accommodations must be made for the
research to be completed; the graphics
research should be part of the story
assignment
• It could be done by the artist, the reporter,
or a designated graphics reporter

63. The Process: Research Sources
• World Wide Web -- invaluable!
• Maps -- From anywhere you go, no matter
how silly or insignificant they may seem
• Encyclopedias -- Provide basics on a wide
variety of subjects
• Chamber of Commerce -- a library of stuff
• Annual reports
• A point-and-shoot camera more

64. The Process: More Research Sources
• The Associated Press
• “Statistical Abstract of the United States”
• Mailing lists, universities
• “The Wall Street Journal Guide to Money and
Investing”
• “Who Knows What: The Essential Business
Resource Book”
• National Weather Service
• “Economic Report of the President”
• World Almanac
• Idiot’s Guides

65. Process: Editing and Communication
Editors and artists must communicate during the
process of graphic development. Other tips:
* Make sure graphic text is clean, tight and
simple -- and correct
* Graphics should go through the same editing
process as stories
* How large should a graphic be?
--- AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE!

67. A Simpler Form of Graphics
• What if you don’t have the time and
resources to do “art graphics?”
• You can still reach readers through a
technique called layering the news ….

68. Layering the News
• The reporting and presentation of a news
story in multiple pieces using a variety of
visual and text-organization techniques.
They range from refers to news in depth,
including analyses and full texts of speeches.
• Layering involves the ability to see the
complete picture -- how headlines, summary
headlines, photos, captions, graphics,
quoteouts, readouts and glance boxes can
work in combination.

70. Three Levels of Layering
* 1) Lists, comparisons woven into graphics
* 2) Data pulled from stories and presented
separately
* 3) Reader education information that
supplements stories
• Layer three is attractive to readers who
don’t buy the paper daily. They look to the
newspaper for meaning.

71. Nugget or Glance Boxes
This nugget
capsulizes the story,
providing the
information at
another layer of
depth.

73. Building
Understanding
This form of
nugget fits a
format -- what is
the news, what
does it mean,
what’s coming up
next?

74. Highlighting
Key Information
The nugget or
glance box allows
you to pull out and
highlight important
story details and
refer to other
stories.

75. Summing Up Design: 8 Simple
Learnings from SND
• Keep it simple
• Let content drive the design
• Take care with the details
• Pay attention to the words as well
• Think like, not for, the reader
• Treat typography with respect
• Reflect your community
• Take a risk every now and then