The coming commodization of infographics

An email lay in my inbox with the tantalizing subject line: "How to Create Good Infographics Quickly and Cheaply?" It's a half-spam from one of the marketing sites that I signed up for long time ago. I clicked on the link, which led me to a landing page which required yet another click to get to the real thing (link). (Now, you wonder why marketers keep putting things in your inbox!)

The article was surprisingly sane. The author, Carrie Hill, suggests that the first thing to do is to ask "who cares?" This is the top corner of my Trifecta Checkup, asking what's the point of the chart. Some of us not so secretly hope that answer to "who cares?" is no one.

Carrie then lists a number of resources for creating infographics "quickly and cheaply".

Easel.ly caught my eye. This website offers templates for creating infographics. You want time-series data depicted as a long, hard road ahead, you have this on the right.

You want several sections of multi-colored bubble charts, you have this theme:

In total, they have 15 ready-made templates that you can use to make infographics. I assume paid customers will have more.

infogr.am is another site with similar capabilities, and apparently for those with some data in hand.

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Based on this evidence, the avanlanche of infographics is not about to pass. In fact, we are going to see the same styles repetitively. It's like looking at someone's Powerpoint presentation and realizing that they are using the "Advantage" theme (one of the less ugly themes loaded by default). In the same way, we will have a long, winding road of civil rights, and a long, winding road of Argentina's economy, and a long, winding road of Moore's Law, etc.

But I have long been an advocate of drag-and-drop style interfaces for producing statistical charts. So I hope the vendors out there learn from these websites and make your products ten times better so that it is as "quick and cheap" to make nice statistical charts as it is to make infographics.