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Infographics

An example

What if I tell you, that Estonia is a very small country compared to, let's say, Austria and Germany. As of 2020, it's population is about 1 326 535 people. Austria has 9 006 398 and Germany 83 783 942.

Ok, now, can you tell me how big is Germanys population compared to Estonia, based on these numbers alone?

You'll probably have to make a quick calculation and maybe imagine a tape measure or a ruler, where you compare 84 cm to 1.3 cm and you'll get an approximate idea. But what about Austria? Do you even remeber its population? OK, you can look it up from above, to be sure and you'll have to do once again the calculations and the tape measure trick.

But what if we want to compare not only the population of three countries but of all the EU members? What if there is more different data, than just the population, that we want to measure and compare?

This is where infographics come in handy.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an infographic (or information graphic) is “a visual representation of information or data”.

Look at the image below. 👇 Now, when the exact same amount of data as above is presented visually, it takes just a few seconds to understand and compare those cumbersome numbers.

Source: World-o-meter - it is also a good habit to show the origin of information

Above is an example of just one very simple dataset. Complex infographics can be much more than this, combining data visualisation, illustration, color theory, pictography, typography and so on.

So, what is infographics?

Some cool examples

Be not afraid - not all the infographics are boring bars. Here is a list of cool examples for inspiration

About data

Personal data

So, you need some data to create infograpics. A simple set of data can be something as simple as uncle Bobs weekly consumption of bewerages as shown below 👇.

DayCoffeeBeer
Mon50
Tue20
Wed23
Thu20
Fri36
Sat14
Sun21

So we can collect personal data and make different graphs based on this information. Here are some examples of personal infographics.

If you have a smart watch or use any sports tracking device / app, you probably collect data about your health and moving or sleeping habits.

But sometimes you want to use data, that is not just about yourself. Luckily there are different public data sources, you can use.

Public data sources

Here is a short list of a few we can use. As always - search for more 🕵️‍♀️

International

Estonian

Types of data formats

Data over APIs

Types of data visualisations

On this page we kept things simple and you saw two examples of boring bar charts. But actually there is a lot of differant ways to visualize same data.

Let's get familar with them.

Which one to choose? It depends on what you want to say. What is important? What is the point you want to make? Because it is important how data is interprated.

Tools

There are some tools and applications that help us to visualise data. Some of them you already know.

Generate simple charts

Online

Advanced software

Code: Javascript and Python