Making infographics.

Yesterday I made an infographic following the guidelines of the practice prompt for the journalism competition. But as I went to save it I messed something up and it deleted. I still wanted to document the progress I have made so I drew a very rough sketch of what I had made. I created this infographic on ease.ly and in order to make it more like the actual competition I didn't use any of the premade items and themes. 

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Family Project: Farrell

Exhibit offers insight into African American WWII Sailors

My great-grandpa Farrell was a captain of the U.S.S. Mason during World War II. His ship was one of the very first with a predominately black crew. I am going to focus some of my family project on him. The article I linked describes the ship rather well. There was also a book and movie made on the ship. I will be tying these aspects into forms of modern journalism. I decided this would be a good way to start because it is journalism.

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Pandora vs. Spotify

I posted some time ago about how pandora a algorithms are cool/scary. I found this infographic pretty eye opening on how many more songs/people are on it. This infographic kind of makes me want to try out spotify as well. It's pretty cool how this kind of comparison can make you want to do one thing more than another. This kind of infographic is popular with some other products but it would be really cool to just be able to look at an infographic where you can really easily compare something you want to buy.

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The Mobile Phone Turns 40

Happy Birthday Mobile Phones
Today arguably the most valuable aspect of modern journalism and communication. Mobile devices are such an important part of my studies. Without them I doubt life would be the same.

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Family Project Update

Yesterday was Easter and I used it as an opportunity to advance my project. Honestly, the most interesting person in my family is my grandfather on my dads side. He is currently in the early stages of dementia so I try to get stories from my dad and his siblings. His belongings are a great way for me to get a window into his life.  One of the most noticeable characteristics are the giant book cases filled with books. There are bookcases filling a huge hallway that couldn't fit another book if they tried. That is just the tip of the iceberg; there is a room, a former office, with walls completely covered in books. It would be cool to check out all of books he has up there but there are piles, no mountains, of books all over the floor. Walking around the house you might miss the rest of the books he has because they are in a number of smaller bookcases throughout the house but don't fret, there are tons. On Sunday when I was at his house I took pictures of a few of the main hallways bookcases.

I am probably going to use this with my family project. I have started an infographic on my family and it will be done soon.

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Google Trends: Infographics

I was on Cool Infographics and I saw that they had embedded the graph from google trends. It is really cool how much the interest has gone up in the past two years. I believe that the interest will continue to grow in the future and more advancements will be made in the field. I'm pretty excited to see things like this and how infographics will advance in the future.

Google Trends

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Infographics Used In Marketing

So I know this infographic has nothing to do with my line of study but I really like when companies use infographics in this way.  The pictures are really pretty and it makes me want to go to PF Changs; I've never been but if the food looks half as good as it is in this infographic I'd be happy. This is a really good way of getting people to go to a restaurant. I think things like this would be great for more companies as a way to use infographics as a marketing technique.

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Infographics

I don’t know about this class but in english we are supposed to treat wikipedia like the gritty underbelly of the internet. However, I feel that you can find a lot of important information on wikipedia so this post is going to be all of the really important/interesting things I find on the infographics wikipedia page.

“In 1626, Christoph Scheiner published the Rosa Ursina sive Sol, a book that revealed his research about the rotation of the sun; Infographics appeared in the form of illustrations demonstrating the Sun’s rotation patterns.”

It is commonly believed that cave dwellers were the first infographic creators, I think that is really cool but Christoph’s creations were the first infographics like the ones created today. Other early infographic creators include Florence Nightingale and Carl Ritter.

Nightingales infographic which was presented to Queen Victoria.

The Pioneer Plaque

Infographics were even created to communicate with aliens! Visual data representation is truly universal. It is so cool to consider that as humans we can create something that can, hopefully,  be understood by an extraterrestrial.

Infographics became more popular in the 20th century. “In 1972 and 1973, respectively, the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft included on their vessels the Pioneer Plaques, a pair of gold-anodized aluminum plaques, each featuring a pictorial message. The pictorial messages included nude male and female figures as well as symbols that were intended to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. The images were designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake and were unique in that their graphical meanings were to be understandable to extraterrestrial beings, who would have no conception of human language.”

Washington DC Metro Map

This picture made me realize I have an infographic hanging in my house.

The Tate Gallery By Tube

This is a picture of the image that is hanging in my house I honestly never even realized that this could be considered an infographic but it is pretty cool.

“Closely related to the field of information graphics is information design, which is the creation of

infographics. Author and founder of the TED, Richard Saul Wurman, is considered the originator of the phrase "information architect" and many of his books, such as Information Anxiety, helped propel the phrase "information design" from a concept to a job category.”

This was actually really cool to find out. It connects two of my favorite parts of my studies this year, and reminds me that I never have time to watch Ted videos lately which sucks.

*I tried to get all of the images on here instead of the links but my laptop froze whenever I tried to insert them*

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