Information Graphics (1)

Infographics are each day more common in our vocabulary. Why?. Because infographics are useful for understanding and communicating. Trough understanding something, we can visualize it and therefore produce a graphic. That said,if you can't visualize something, you can't understand it; and probably you need an infographic!. In trying to understand something, you can make a mental image of it, visualize it, and therefore, create a graphic. And then, show and communicate it, making it understandable to others.

Both steps have tricky parts. The first one is all about understanding rightly, and the second one, to cut off ambiguities, to show it to others. Seeing is believing says the adage. But you must see clearly. It is said that the image is related to long term memory and text to short term memory. I relate this to the fact that the image conveys more information rapidly. The text is a large chain of meanings being decoded linearly, building up meaning through sedimentation., from letters to words, from sentences to paragraphs, and so on.

Infographics published in Peruvian newspaper Correo.

The image conveys a lot of information (colour, size, position) in a small time and appealing to our visual comprehension, the one we have most developed (we are not so good at smell and audition as other species). There is a caveat also. As information theory shows us, any code is as good as the capacity of the decoder channel. This is the attention cost. Being of simultaneous nature, there is a limit to what we can apprehend from the image ( it is our limitation, not one of the image). At a certain point of complexity, an image can be digested trough levels of visual understanding and segmentation. Text and image manage to cover both the spectrum of short and long term and fast and slow recall.
On the page of a newspaper, a curious panorama is offered to the reader, a hierarchy system in the display of information, because in the discovery of the information within the diary page, the first blow, so to speak, corresponds to the image; here we talk about photography for its documentary aura, also appealing to the emotion. At the other end is the text, detailing the news, giving extended information. Between them, at halfway is the diagram half image and half text, being more rational, playing an intermediate step between the impact of the photo and the detail of the story.