Book Review: Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design

Infographics is the new cool thing in publishing. Put the word into Amazon search and you'll come up with more than three hundred titles, either tech books (like this one) or mainstream books using infographics as the theme: The infographics history of the world; The infographics book of the human body. Maybe we can expect The Infographics Cookbook later this year.

Most of the titles though are of the tech sort and I think Randy Krum's book is as good as any for a broad overview of infographics. The seven chapters present a ton of information in easily accessible writing style. Predictably the text leans towards online visual presentation rather than print and one of the strengths of the book are the extensive weblinks (plus a brief commentary about them) at the end of each chapter, for all kinds of templates, graphics and tools used for creating designs.

I found chapter four on infographic resumes particularly interesting. This seems to be a coming trend though I found the samples shown anything but concise. Pages 178 shows a conventional typed resume and on the opposite page the same information interpreted as a colorful graphic. This visual was hardly the sort of thing any HR manager would be able to absorb quickly. Fortunately several companies (like LinkedIn) are exploring ways of presenting professional details in a standard visual format.

I think it's worth saying that this is not a book about the specifics of graphic design and typography in infographics, it steps back from that to present a broader view and like many titles about a visual subject takes rather too many words to explain something where a picture and caption would have worked better. I think it really would have helped the reader if the illustrations throughout the pages used good and bad examples and deep captions to explain the differences. The several dozen illustrations in the book only point out positive aspects and not what to avoid.

The book's product is typical for a tech book: largish type, wide margins for captions and credits, a reasonable matt art for the color graphics. There is an index and book list with only eight titles and surprisingly it doesn't include the enormous, 480 page Information Graphics from Taschen. It also didn't include a small chunky book that reproduces several hundred Snapshots from USA Today: USA TODAY Snapshots®: More Than 2,000 Facts and Figures on Life, Love, Money, and Sports!. These really are ultimate infographics: very concise and beautifully designed.

Randy Krum's book is the ideal guide if you are starting out in infographics.

Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Spread two of the Contents.

Chapter opener.

Two resumes.

The all singing and dancing resume from Sasha.

The huge Taschen book full of infographics. USA Today have been doing lovely graphics for years.

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