Visual journalism is slow—at least it seems so, compared with written journalism. While many written pieces take a day or two, visual stories can easily take weeks to produce. Meanwhile the news cycle is advancing a few rounds. By tracking the time on a sample project, three time sinks can be identified that contribute to the slower pace of visual journalism:

1. Research takes longer than in written journalism
2. It involves many more tools
3. Visual journalists are also designers

A typical project

The examined specimen is a piece on the cramped living conditions in the Gaza strip. Its main visual is a 3D-illustration of rooms filled with people. This chart contrasts the living space for a typical Swiss person to the space available to someone living in Gaza. This centerpiece is complemented with a map showing what proportion of buildings are still intact, and how the South is filling up due to people fleeing. From pitch to publication, it took two weeks.

This piece is a perfect example for our experiment: the result is fairly standard for visual journalism, but uncharacteristically, it was mostly done by a single person. That made it easier to pinpoint where the time was spent. The two-week timesheet looks like this:

Research and analysis took up most of the time—four days in total. Out of ten days, I only spent seven working on this project. During the remaining three days, I worked on other projects, administrative tasks and an in-house training. Design and graphics production took two days, and the text just about a day.

Time sink 1: Research takes longer

Research is by far the most laborious part when producing a visual piece. Such articles inherently require more research than most texts to tell the story right. Take just one detail: it takes 10 seconds to write that, “people from north of the Gaza strip have fled to the South.” But it takes an hour to find out that the border that separates north and south is in the Wadi Gaza wetlands, and then even longer to find the geodata to show this on a map. Researching just a few such details quickly amounts to a day’s work. Simply because you want to show something rather than tell it.

Even after locating the right information, it is often not in the right form to compare it with other pieces of information. In the Gaza example, I had estimates on the number of destroyed buildings. But what I was really looking for was the amount of destroyed living space. An apartment building in Gaza city represents a bigger loss of living space than a farmhouse outside of Rafah. So I had to make some educated guesses based on district population numbers. But to find and combine these numbers with the data on destroyed buildings took even more time. This is how I ended up taking four days just for research and analysis.

One way to speed up this work is through specialization. When journalists focus on the same topics for a while, they become familiar with the sources and data. This happened during the COVID-19 pandemic with data journalists. As they worked with the same datasets over and over, their productivity increased. Visual journalists, however, are usually few in number and often remain generalists, unlike other journalists who typically cover a limited range of topics or beats.

Another strategy is to advocate for more open data. We can lobby governments, organizations, scientists, and companies to provide more information and make it more accessible. This doesn’t just mean numbers—plans for machines or architectural models are just as valuable and often even harder to obtain.

Time sinks 2 and 3: Tools and redesign

To create the main chart, I used three tools. First, I modeled the rooms and figures in Blender. Then, I exported these models to Figma to add labels and create variations for different device sizes. Finally, I uploaded everything into Q, a graphics production tool integrated with our CMS.

While exporting graphics between tools only takes a few seconds, these seconds add up as we make changes and iterate. This is especially true when we experiment with new representations, like the dot density plot turned room filled with people. A lot of iteration happened to decide on camera angles, colors and the figure poses. And with each iteration, the chart has to pass through all of the tools before we can see the final result.

For more established charts, like the map of the Gaza Strip, the process is shorter. We’ve done the map multiple times and many design choices are settled: the shades of gray for buildings, the width of roads and rivers, etc. So, the first remedy for a complex toolchain and eternal redesigns is standardization. At NZZ, we use a style guide and share templates to reduce the number of design decisions needed.

A more challenging, but also more exciting improvement would be better integration between design tools. Something similar to the live reload feature commonly found in HTML editors or interactive notebooks. If any researcher is up for the challenge, I’d be happy to talk!

What about division of work?

Work is often split between writing and graphics production. However, the timesheet shows that only one of seven days was spent writing. This highlights a common frustration: writers finish their half of the work and must wait for graphics to catch up.

A more effective approach is to split the research tasks among multiple people. After all, these take most of the time. Anecdotal evidence from our newsroom shows that this speeds up the process. However, research for visual pieces is different from that for written pieces, as visual pieces often require specific details that are unnecessary for the text. For example, researching that “people in northern Gaza fled to the South” is different from researching geodata indicating the border of the two. Therefore, not all journalists can immediately contribute research for visual pieces; it requires some training and experience in working together.

Conclusion

In summary, I propose five ways to speed up the production of visual pieces:

1. Specialization: Visual journalists should have areas of expertise, especially for major events like COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, or the conflict in the Gaza Strip.
2. Advocate for Open Data: Lobby for more open data, particularly non-numeric data such as airplane blueprints or architectural models.
3. Use Templates and Style Guides: Implement templates and a consistent style guide to streamline production.
4. Optimize Workflows: Develop workflows that better integrate various design tools and make iteration faster.
5. Train Journalists: Educate other journalists on how to conduct research for visual pieces.

These improvements can make visual journalism more responsive to current events. However, even with these changes, it is unlikely to reach the speed of written journalism. This list is definitely far from conclusive and I’m happy to read your thoughts and experiences.

The post Why Visual Journalism Is So Slow appeared first on Nightingale.

The Impact Project and similar organizations are focused on mapping the regional impacts of federal employee firings and science funding cuts. The Washington Post put out an innovative choose-your-own-adventure flowchart and a calendar-based tracker of executive orders. 

As the months have dragged on, most news agencies have defaulted to standardized and easily-editable tables and drop-down menus by topic. Each news outlet is faced with the same dilemma: What information do you provide and how much of it? Every graphics editor has had to dust off their notes on cognitive load and come up with their own solutions. 

Most data viz practitioners will agree that less is more here. Give people the topic, a short description, and a simple status update. This is a tracker, not a full story, after all. Simple data viz designs ensure the tracker is easy to use and update—but is it actually easier to understand than a full story? 

For executive orders that have been blocked by a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order, do you opt for concrete legal language or go with something more relatable like “blocked for now?” For lawsuits that have been filed, but no action has yet been taken by the courts, do you go with the literal “lawsuit filed,” or the more descriptive “awaiting decision/in progress.” And in the multiple cases where the Trump administration appears to be defying court orders, do you note that in some way? What about threats against judges? 

These are hard calls to make and I genuinely appreciated seeing AP be honest about this with a category on their tracker called, “It’s complicated.” In some respects, that uncertainty should be reflected in our data visualizations, lest we normalize what is an incredibly abnormal time in the United States.

In my own work at KUOW, NPR’s Seattle station, I sought to answer two simple questions for our audience: (1) How are Trump’s orders impacting people in Washington state and (2) What is the state doing about it? I made a conscious choice not to build this tracker for lawyers. They don’t need it. That means everything in my tracker had to come back to my top two questions without relying on legalese. I landed on three status options. At any point in time, a Trump executive order could be: In effect, partially in effect, or not in effect.

By limiting myself to the actual outcome of these orders, I was able to highlight how executive actions benefit from the slow pace of the court system. As cases wait in limbo, the laws that fueled them are in effect and impacting Americans. The “partially in effect” status allowed me to capture the messiness of these court battles. In the case of fired federal employees, two similar cases were being heard simultaneously. In one case, the court required fired employees in 19 states to be reinstated. In another case, the court required fired employees within 6 agencies to be reinstated. For Washington state, that meant some employees would be reinstated while others would not. 

Our newsroom also made the choice to add the tag, “Trump is possibly defying the courts” to our list of options. This was after significant discussion about the importance of presenting the news as it stands, uncertainty and all. Turmoil and all.

My Trump tracker has gone through a few iterations—and will no doubt continue to evolve—but for now, it serves as a landing post for our Washington state audience to understand how they intersect with these big national stories. The tracker consists of two graphics: (1) A quick filterable status list and (2) A detailed table with background information and links to our original reporting on these issues at home. You can visit KUOW’s Trump tracker here.

The post The Art of the Trump Tracker: How Data Viz Can Combat News Fatigue appeared first on Nightingale.

Today, our purpose has never been clearer: to demystify Asia using data, bridge the gap between research and the public, uplift the stories of underserved communities, and foster a collective of data visualisation enthusiasts in the region. As the team grows more confident and takes on a stronger voice, our visual expression needs to be more distinct and recognisable as our own too. 

However, it is easy to become too engrossed in the day-to-day deliverables and focus solely on the technical improvements of our work that we lose sight of what sets us apart from others in the field. To unify our creative vision and resonate with our audience in Asia, we established shared design principles that extend beyond aesthetics and remain true to our core values: authenticity, integrity, diversity, collaboration, and trust. 

#1 Embrace our identity

Staying grounded in our Asian roots is important to us. After all, Kontinentalist was born out of the desire to reframe the global narrative about Asia, which often lacks nuance and sensitivity. But how does this manifest in our visual identity and creative processes? For us, championing Asia means drawing inspiration from our personal and communal lived experiences as Asians first.

With a team of Southeast Asians from various ethnic backgrounds, it feels only natural that our visual identity pays homage to the diverse and vibrant cultures of our home. Our typography, colour system, and imagery are inspired by Southeast Asian iconography and heritage. Stylistically, we infused a hint of brutalism—now the visual vernacular language of the social media generation— to create a look that is more casual, approachable, and reflective of the zeitgeist. Together, these design elements create a consistent leitmotif and distinctive visual grammar that permeates our work, including the data visualisations. Any extensions to or deviations from our design system would have to be in harmony with our identity.

Our typography, colour system, and imagery are inspired by Southeast Asian iconography and heritage.

#2 Humanise Asia

Despite the fact that Asia is home to almost 50 countries, Asia’s multifaceted cultures and societies are often inaccurately flattened into a single, monolithic entity in the global discourse. We can see how this plays out in data visualisations too. Presenting Asia in a purely statistical way feels detached from the lived realities on the ground, and oversimplifies the diversity of Asian experiences and identities. How might we take on a more human-centred approach to designing our data stories? 

Two years ago, we collaborated with UNHCR to produce a visual story about the arduous journey of the Rohingya Muslim minority as they fled the Rakhine State in Myanmar in search of safety and refuge. We wanted the story to be intimate and poignant, and spur the audience into action. We chose to structure our narrative and present our data with a cinematic lens, which subtly emphasises the universal themes of survival and longing to belong. 

We begin with an expansive title sequence that places the audience in the perspective of the refugees. Throughout the story, we weave together data visualisations, oral accounts, prose, and portraits, carefully calibrating the flow of information to keep the audience engaged. The choice of accompanying illustrations, personal recounts, and other editorial decisions matter as much to bring to life the human stories behind the numbers and to accurately depict the Rohingya refugees as real people with their own experiences instead of reducing them to tragic victims. By the end credits, we want the audience to feel like they have embarked on a journey of discovery and gained a deeper understanding of the Rohingya’s plight, regardless of their background.

#3 Innovate with the reader in mind

Despite the increasing importance of data in today’s world, multiple studies have shown a worrying lack of data literacy in the Asia Pacific workforce. This means a complex visualisation might be detrimental for viewers who lack experience in discerning patterns or do not have access to high-speed internet, especially in some regions of Asia. On the other hand, a simplistic chart may fail to fully capture the complexity of a dataset. This forces us to be more thoughtful of our audience’s needs and experiences as we strive to experiment with unconventional data visualisations.

Incorporating empathy into our innovation process can transform our stories from mere displays of information into meaningful educational tools that equip our readers with the skills to read data and interpret insights on their own, and empower them to make informed decisions for themselves and their communities. Our design guidelines stress the importance of accessibility and usability without compromising creativity. How might we build a story that supports both the audience’s needs and the ambitions of the story?

One way we try to achieve this is by introducing exploratory breathers into our stories when a chart or concept may be unfamiliar to the audience. In our story on Asian representation in Hollywood blockbusters, we invite the audience to take an active role in uncovering insights by engaging with the chart first-hand in a sandbox-like environment at the end of the story. By doing so, they can peel back the layers of the data themselves, focusing on the details that matter most to them.

Furthermore, we often experiment with narrative formats. In a story about what goes into the preparation of the Diwali festival in a household, we use comics to tell our data stories. By directly addressing the audience in a conversational tone, we are able to break down data and information into easily digestible visuals and text.

#4 Enrich through visuals

We learned that visual encoding, when used effectively, can delight the audience and add depth to visual communication, elevating our stories on a cultural and emotional level. Visual expressions are also an avenue to celebrate the rich culture and diversity of Asia. However, using cultural motifs in data visualisation requires a fine balance between creativity and sensitivity. 

Asia is a diverse continent and being Asian does not give us a free pass to appropriate cultural elements without understanding their significance. Exoticism and tokenism will undermine any meaningful representation of data. As much as we want to use visual shorthands that are instantly recognisable and intuitive, it is crucial to do our research and acknowledge any inherent Eurocentric biases that may cloud our judgement. We avoid using cultural symbols superficially as decorative elements or aesthetic choices without making any meaningful connection to the content and context of the data they represent.

To explore the changing patterns of Han Chinese names and their connection to China’s societal norms, we designed custom visualisations inspired by the ancient game of Chinese chess, Xiangqi. Using chessboard pieces to represent the data points is especially fitting because each piece contains a single character that implies a role and conveys a specific meaning, much like the names discussed in the story. 

We believe that good guidelines can empower us to be adaptive, flexible, and responsive in this rapidly-evolving field while remaining true to our core values.

Develop living, breathing design guidelines

Data storytelling can be like a team sport, as friends from Thibi, a data storytelling and design consultancy, once pointed out, and this analogy certainly rings true for Kontinentalist. While designers are responsible for the final design outputs, our data stories are often the product of the organic exchange of ideas and collaborative efforts involving editors, writers, developers, subject matter experts and community partners. Visual guidelines are not important just for the designers but also for other team members because shared language and expectations allow us to mediate different perspectives when solving problems and ideating visualisations together. 

At Kontinentalist, we “#1 Embrace our identity”, “#2 Humanise Asia”, “#3 Innovate with the reader in mind”, “#4 Enrich through visuals.” Each designer actively participates in the development and iterations of our visual guidelines by formulating or reviewing design methodologies that put these principles into concrete practice and workflows. We believe that good guidelines can empower us to be adaptive, flexible, and responsive in this rapidly-evolving field while remaining true to our core values. Therefore, our visual guidelines are not designed to be restrictive, but rather to evolve alongside our expertise and the changing landscape of our industry. Currently, we are maintaining a total of 10 design-related guidelines, including data visualisation and social media guidelines. By encouraging participation and collaboration, we foster a sense of ownership and accountability among designers and cultivate a culture in which everyone is invested in the success of their projects, and more likely to embrace the guidelines.

Lastly, advocating for good design principles goes beyond our team and that is why we’re committed to sharing knowledge with a wider audience through workshops and the educational Data Deep Dive series on social media. By sharing our best practices and creative processes with our audience, we hope that they will grow alongside us in their data storytelling journey.

The post Looking East: Kontinentalist’s Design Principles Enhance the Asian Narrative appeared first on Nightingale.

AI is the new sensation. Will it be helpful in creating infographics? What are the dos and don’ts?

I think that AI as an aid to design is very useful to save time in tedious processes. But something very different is to expect a totally original result or to achieve something that accurately emulates what we have in mind.

Infographics is an informative need that is built on existing information, data processing, and representation of elements. Infographics must be understood by different audiences, with different levels of complexity and meeting different needs.

Infographics must be a user-centered design that reflect a creative process. Visual explanations must “understand” the audience, that is, they must efficiently show what the user is willing and interested in exploring in less than 20 seconds.

When an infographic department evolves in the ways of creating visual explanations, it is much more difficult to standardize the working methods. Artificial intelligence would need many references to achieve a fresh result, with a stamp of originality.

AI can be expected to cooperate in refining certain contents or to support us in specific processes. What cannot be expected, at least these days, is to achieve a brilliant, original, functional and instantaneous result. Besides, human information design still has an irreplaceable emotional richness, it is generated from experience and comes close to what the reader expects to see.

“What cannot be expected [ from AI], at least these days, is to achieve a brilliant, original, functional and instantaneous result…Human information design still has an irreplaceable emotional richness, it is generated from experience and comes close to what the reader expects to see.

There is another aspect that I would like to mention. The authors of infographics have the intention of expressing and sharing their own ideas when creating a visual piece. And the result can be stimulating when we notice a good reception from the audience and our peers, or it can be frustrating when it is not. It’s all about the ego of the creator. When finishing a graphic, the expectation is to achieve something as close as possible to what we have conceived in our mind. Automating that journey through AI doesn’t seem to be an option that many of us seriously consider. 

South China Morning Post is one of those publications that promotes infographics. Can you explain how the print readers and web viewers have responded to them?

Our printed infographics have a good reputation among our audience. Our newsroom is always open to give us the space to publish our material, and that is a privilege. There is also something we have noticed, on the day of the publishing of a printed infographic, we always post our printed page on social media (Twitter or Instagram), which gives us good traffic and great feedback. That tells us that people still appreciate seeing all the information in one static frame. This encourages us to continue publishing full page infographics and to continue exploring the many possibilities that paper offers.

For our online pieces, we have a very solid post-production system connected to multiple areas of the newsroom, which allows our work to be promoted on the web. Obviously the exposure time [to infographics] is limited, since the publication’s offerings are massive and there are many other articles to highlight on our front page, but when the numbers (visits) are good, and they often are, the permanence of our work extends for a few days.

It is a way to understand the audience as well, by reviewing the number of page views and the behaviour of a visual story over time.

There are stories, which are the result of a long working process, involving resources, time, discussions and planning, finally receiving satisfactory results.

On other occasions, we create very simple stories that have required little effort and production time, which achieve surprising numbers and which maintain a very acceptable level of visits over time.

Which work thrills you more—print or web? And how different are they?

I have a strong background in print, however, I think the online platform offers many more possibilities and obviously has a wider reach. That said, I can’t lean towards one in particular. Making infographics for print has a charm from start to finish (because obviously there is an end point to the process of infographics for print, not so for online), and it always connects me to the beginnings of my career in visual information.

The exciting thing about print is that time, space, and resources are limited so it demands more creativity and practical thinking.

Online infographics, on the other hand, allow the development of topics in different dimensions, it imposes a wide range of skills as in content, form and functionality, but it does not limit the expressions and creativity, on the contrary, it expands them.

Online pieces require a permanent tracking and solid testing processes to ensure the good performance of the information for all users, all the time.

Even though print infographics are more permanent and tangible than online infographics, I like the immediacy and the capacity for permanent editing and expansion that online work allows when it comes to sharing my work with the audience.

Can you explain how you or your team visualised the project “Fly at your own risk: Nepal’s poor air safety record”?

After the plane crash in Pokhara, multiple videos and images of the catastrophe emerged, our idea at first was to explain the accident in a breaking news format, but after doing some research, we realized that it was more important to explain the reasons for the increasing number of accidents in the skies of Nepal. The infographic was published three weeks after the accident. And it includes mainly general statistics on Nepalese civil aviation, the existing standards, and the complexity of the conditions imposed by the geography on the most experienced pilots.

We started the project by understanding how the accident happened and explaining the characteristics of the crash site.

We include a detail of the ATR72-500 model, in those days a theory of the cause of the accident arose, based on the observation of some videos made from the cockpit, where you can see that the flaps were not properly deployed at the time of the approach, causing the speed of the aircraft to not decrease. This point is explained in the diagram.

 An interior layout of the aircraft and dimensional references were also included.

In civil aeronautics there is fortunately a lot of information available, which helped us to define a series of visualizations, we only included in the project the most relevant ones.

An example is a graph that shows which are the most critical phases during a flight in Nepal, we realized that accidents occur towards the end of the trip, practically in 50% of the occurrences, as shown in the following diagram:

In all our projects, the usual thing is to create an image that opens the piece, this image is also used for the promotion of the infographics in social networks. It is part of our process, and I can affirm that it is one of the tasks we enjoy the most.

Do you work on a template or approach every graphic independently?

That depends on the type of graph we are working on. For the simplest and daily coverage we use templates, for those projects in which we can invest more time and resources, we always look for an original and different approach. Each topic represents an expectation to accomplish, as well as each artist has a particular vision of how to tell a story and we respect that before anything else.

What are the most important considerations for infographic designers?

Nowadays the word “infographics” is not enough to describe what we information designers or visual journalists are currently developing. Visual storytelling is too broad, and stories can be told in multiple ways. In that sense, infographics departments have evolved towards more dynamic results, but essentially connected to a creative way of captivating the audience using unique visual narratives, and originating from direct experience (field reporting, first-person research) rather than relying on more common formulas such as isometric representation of a space, or the use of a set of graphs and diagrams. It has been a long time since it required some expertise to create this type of element, now there are many tools available that deliver quite acceptable results.

You also have to consider what the audience is willing to explore. My suspicion is that more than some readers when seeing an isometric drawing (just as an example of a widely used method of representing a space in an infographic) may feel some aversion because it tends to be an overly recurrent and technical representation of reality, and to put any minor obstacle between the information and the reader these days is always a risk.

For me, the most important consideration to keep at the top of the list, is to enhance the ability to discover stories that deserve to be told visually. The technical aspects, interactivity and virtuosity are very important but without the first ability it will be hard to produce interesting visual explainers.

Can you explain how you visualised the award-winning project “Life in a Shoe Box”?

Hong Kong is a vibrant and cosmopolitan city, full of attractions and contrasts, one of them is represented by the great difference in the living conditions of its inhabitants. It is considered one of the most expensive cities in the world, which is partially true in my experience. What is really expensive here is housing. The monthly rent for half of the apartments is at least US$2,250, while Hong Kong households’ monthly median income is US$3,600.

This problem is exacerbated for those living below the poverty line (20% of the population, or 1.65 million people), who face serious difficulties in finding decent housing.

A practice among many landlords is to subdivide an apartment into modules, it can be three or four modules in one flat, but there are also cases where the situation is extreme and the space is forced to accommodate up to 20 small modules (which sometimes means having 20 sq.ft. spaces for one person). Obviously the conditions offered are deplorable.

In general, these types of configurations are found in old buildings, with low maintenance, poor thermal insulation and non-existent security measures. The inhabitants are generally older men with very low incomes and no family to help them.

This is one of the aspects that has been widely covered previously by the media, in the form of reports and documentaries, but the challenge we had as a team was to provide more direct spatial references and represent in a more vivid way (without using photographs) this reality, to put the reader in a new perspective in front of this situation.

From this starting point we proposed to consider any detail that would help to understand the limitations in space and comfort of the residents of these cubicles.

We planned several interviews and a round of visits to apartments where the landlords maintained inhabited cubicles.

With the help of a local NGO that was visiting many of these places to distribute medicine, food or some legal assistance, we were able to enter the flats for field research, in order to cover technical aspects such as materiality, dimensions, lighting, ventilation, use of common and private spaces, etc., and human aspects such as coexistence, urgent needs, sanitation problems, daily routines, experiences and opinions of the tenants.

During each visit the team was equipped with cameras, notebooks, measuring instruments, etc. in order to capture the maximum information, we knew that the chance to visit the places again in the short term was very hard.

The team decided to use mainly illustrations; this was a decision discussed in the planning stage. We completely ruled out the use of photographs or videos in our piece because we didn’t want to expose real homes, and the intention was to respect people’s privacy. In addition, the attractiveness of an illustration, based on analysis and made from videos, images, quick sketches, and 3D modelling tools helped to visualise the elements, and to show more accurately the composition and structure of the small rooms.

Here’s the sketching from original idea to final visual analysis:

A 3D model allowed us to displace-rotate the walls of the cubicle in order to avoid hidden objects and angles and see how every surface of the limited space is used by the resident.

By combining digital and traditional drawing techniques, the final product enriches the user experience and delivers a more immersive result. Animations were included in the beginning to contextualise the location of these houses. Various illustrative styles were combined to accurately depict the critical living situations of these people as witnessed by each artist.

Official figures or data reports from local universities were the complement of the field investigation, in order to show a complete panorama of housing solutions in Hong Kong at all levels. This information allowed us to add references of area and cost per square foot.

Pencil sketches at each location were followed by 3D models and animations. These served only as a base to build the final appearance of the piece, which preserves well-differentiated illustrative styles and follows defined functions. An informative animation at the top gives a very close idea of the real appearance of the places, another line-drawing style done in Procreate helps to explain the cubicles, and a few larger, more generic, illustrations were used to separate and represent the following explanation of each housing type.

After the production of the assets and writing the story, it took us several weeks to make the online piece fully operational for all platforms. We had several rounds of revision, correction and polishing of visual details. The published piece gives readers an updated and realistic portrayal of many Hongkongers’ living conditions.

The full research process and the round of interviews helped us to build one big infographic and three long read stories with illustrations and charts. The active role of our reporter Fiona Sun in all the process of gathering information combined with our field work and research, helped us to have original content and an unique approach to a well-known issue of this city.

As an infographic expert, how do you visualise the growth of infographics and the new platforms on which it can spread?

The growth and [unification] of infographics on the new platforms will necessarily depend on the degree of functionality they offer. It does not mean that complex infographics or those that are a very personal expression of the author will disappear. All kinds of infographics will continue to exist; Just as today it is possible to find a wide range of them, from the unreadable one to a super-efficient piece. At the end of the day, the audiences will always be very diverse and there will continue to be products for specific groups of people.

But the visual journalist, which seeks to inform well and quickly, will need to put the user at the centre of his or her priorities.

If we ask ourselves, “What is a successful infographic?”, today we can have multiple opinions, according to our principles, aesthetic beliefs, experiences, or needs. Maybe in the future, we will say something totally different. But my feeling is that the answer related to the number of visits or clicks will be the one at the top of the list. 

European, American, and Spanish approaches to infographics look very different. How do you differentiate them?

It is well known that information graphics departments around the world are very different in their nature, functions, and origin.

There are some teams with 30 talented people ready to cover different needs, and others with only four designers trying to give their best, and in many cases achieve amazing results. What determines the approach to infographics of each team is the relevance they have in the newsroom, the autonomy and support they receive, the resources they are provided with, and the topics they are allowed to cover, among other factors

I don’t think there is a big difference in how topics are explained, the visualization formulas or explanatory techniques used in Europe or America are similar—what obviously changes is the story they want to tell, but the most relevant factor to make a huge difference is the resources available backing the infographic work.

Infographics or data visualisation. Which one do you love most? And why?

Today and during the past, the term infographics has been widely used to describe products that are not infographics, when searching in Google, practically 100% of the results are wrong, and then it is necessary to refine the search to find a real one.

Both disciplines are in my heart, but my love is much greater for infographics (which also include clear and clean data visualizations, useful for a big audience).

Since my childhood I was intrigued and captivated by the brilliant way that diagrams, thematic maps, scientific illustrations, and later, infographics explain complex phenomena, structures, places, and situations.

I started in infographics in 1996, back then it was a different scenario, different urges and concerns, different skills to learn, different things to feel proud of, and different motivations. And the constant evolution that infographics experienced along all these years keeps me amazed. I would say, the Malofiej Awards made our beloved profession grow and change to reach unexpected limits. I really miss that event, same as many other colleagues

Infographics is something that wraps you from the beginning and shows you multiple paths; it can be kind but it also can be harsh. It can show you all the fields of knowledge, it gives you the chance to learn, it can take you to many places if you want, and it can introduce you to plenty of interesting people.

At this point, I think it is a kind of unconditional love.

The post Marcelo Duhalde’s Graphics Bring Journalistic Investigations to Life appeared first on Nightingale.

I’m told by the authors that this project grew out of a loose collaboration over many years, its origins going back to 1995.  At the time, Paul Kahn was running the Dynamic Diagrams agency and Hugh Dubberly was Design Director at Netscape where they collaborated on a series of celebrated maps of early web-based applications. Twenty years later, they both found themselves teaching in the Information Design and Data Visualization MFA program at Northeastern University where they met Liuhuaying Yang when she was a graduate student in that program.

We asked the authors to talk about what prompted them to write about these visualizations, their collaborative archive called the COVIC database, and what the data visualization community can learn from this kind of reflection.

JF: Why did the team write this essay?

Paul: I was looking regularly at The New York Times and The Washington Post and was impressed by the drama and ingenuity of the visualizations they published. The death milestones were, intentionally, the most dramatic. I started subscribing to the Financial Times at the start of the pandemic. The FT’s view of the world from The City in London was so entirely materialistic, it was a balance to reading the US news. That is how I discovered John Burn-Murdoch’s work and saw how influential his line charts became during the ‘flatten the curve’ phase.  It was Liuhuaying’s contributions that really gave us a sense of the visualizations coming from Singapore and China. And Hugh was analyzing the way The New York Times was devoting blocks of front-page space to pandemic visualizations week after week. We were sending each other examples and commenting on them for many months.

I saw there were great examples coming from many different news organizations that focused on the quantity of loss. The emerging pattern of strategies to visualize death milestones struck me as something worth writing about. Once it started, it was natural for it to become a collaboration project. It was possible because the three of us had views, ideas, and experiences that complimented each other.

JF: What is a death milestone? Is this something unique to the COVID-19 pandemic? 

Paul: In the essay, we say these milestones are visualizations of big numbers and points of reflection. In our initial email discussions, we were comparing the online visualizations to the physical COVID-19 memorials that were popping up in different countries, and comparing those to war memorials. Along with the online visualizations, we collected links to stories and videos about physical memorials. There was A World Remembers in New Zealand’s STUFF that described memorials in the US, England, Germany, Italy, Argentina, South Africa, Indonesia, India, and Russia. We learned from this and decided to limit the essay to comparisons of the online examples.

I do think the visualization of death milestones is unique to the COVID-19 pandemic because they appeared while the event was happening. The Oklahoma City National Memorial or Mamayev Kurgan Memorial to the Battle of Stalingrad or The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Wall is created to remember events that happened in the past. Some of the visualizations we present in the article were certainly reaching for closure, but closure wasn’t there. 

Liuhuaying: I was inspired to search for examples of death memorials. How do we link to what visual representation? What do we think of death? I still remembered Paul’s comment on those physical representations: “a lot of flags, a lot of melting ice figures, a lot of nails, a lot of names, the wall of faces”. It seems that we have a kind of “convention” when we memorize deaths. Then how is it different in a pandemic context, particularly in COVID-19 one? Also, compared to physical representations, we master other kinds of techniques, such as data visualizations with interactive web pages and animations. How would this make things different?

JF:  The introduction to Unimaginable Death mentions the COVID-19 Online Visualization Collection (COVIC). Can you explain that collection and how it relates to this project?

Paul: COVIC began in March 2020. That was a special moment for many people around the world. I participated in a Center for Design conversation with Dr. Isabelle Boutron from the University of Paris and this is when she started what became the Covid-19 – living NMA initiative to map all the COVID-19 clinical trials. Last week at a talk at the Rumsey Map Center, Jessica Martin from Bloomberg CityLab recounted how it was that moment when she and Laura Bliss came up with the idea to ask readers to submit homemade maps of their lives that became The Quarantine Atlas. It was a moment when everyone had to stop and look around for something to do. That gave birth to many projects.

From the beginning, COVIC was a collection of visualizations. Initially, it was a spreadsheet of articles that contained visualizations, with metadata about the publisher, language, country, date, and subject. I sent an email to a network of friends, colleagues, and former students in many countries asking them to send in links, which seeded the international nature of the collection. It was Hugh who looked at this and said: This is about the figures. It was at that point, when we had a few hundred articles, that we went back to record and classify each individual figure. We tried to brainstorm a way to automate this, to extract and clip the visualizations, but we did it ‘by hand’ so to speak. We had many undergraduate and graduate students from Northeastern helping with support from the Center for Design, along with volunteers who contacted us.

Liuhuaying: I gathered examples for COVIC whenever I saw them, especially those from the Chinese community. They are numerous and many are fantastic. It’s also interesting for us to see how different or similar the visual strategies can be by comparing it to the English-speaking community.

The first example I contributed to COVIC was my own project. In early Feb 2020, I created an interactive website titled “Dynamic tracking of COVID-19 in Singapore” for zaobao.sg, the digital platform of the Chinese dailies in Singapore. We visualized the daily situation reports released by the Ministry of Health to inform and communicate with local audiences about the COVID-19 situation in Singapore. As the situation evolved, we kept updating the data every day until June 2nd. The aim of the visualization is to help better picture the relationship between cases within a cluster, how these clusters are interrelated and activities-based, and how cases are disseminated to various hospitals.

I presented this project in the Summer school course and on other occasions to share my visual strategies, intentions, and challenges. A comment I heard most is how unique or uncommon it was that we visualized individuals. I thought it was attributed to data availability until I saw how other examples in COVIC managed to visualize the trees in the forest.

Paul: In May 2020, I taught remotely a summer school course about collecting visualizations during the pandemic. I was in France, my students were in their homes around the US, and my guest speakers were in many parts of the world.  The discussion with students and presentations by Liuhuaying and others helped to solidify the ideas. We wanted to create something that could be used for teaching and research when the pandemic was no longer happening. We could see the pandemic was inspiring and challenging the data visualization community, it was changing data journalism, and it was producing elaborate yet ephemeral results. The data was changing, things were appearing and disappearing, paywalls were opening and closing, and vaccines, mutations, and social and political issues were morphing every few weeks. I thought then, and still think, it is important to gather with an open mind about the role visualization plays, then classify to support later search and filtering.

COVIC is an opportunistic collection. I am not a social scientist, so I had to learn that this is a ‘thing’ or at least a recognized method. We have collected what was presented to us, what people sent us, what we came across, and what was linked to what we read. COVIC is a large and organized sample from an infinite set.

Our version 1.0 was made with Google Sheets, an Amazon S3 server for storing images, and custom code to visualize the figures. That version worked but didn’t scale. We had no idea how big it would get. When we approached 10,000 figures we had to migrate to the current version 2.0, which is managed in Airtable bases and visualized with a custom Javascript SAP. The public COVIC Visualizer is available to everyone and documented on the COVIC website. The metadata can be shared on request in CSV format.

Hugh: Early discourse on design history tends to focus on individual artifacts, this poster, that book, or perhaps a particular subway signage system. But design practice explores ‘spaces of possibilities’ or ‘solution spaces’ with any designed artifact being just one of many possible choices considered. Design history, particularly as it relates to visualizations, is beginning to recognize this fact. Comparative histories (and critiques) require collections of related work; collections, however, require databases for managing and for accessing works.

So, in addition to recording a specific set of visualizations of COVID-19, we also saw the COVIC project as exploring an emerging approach to comparative design history. From that frame, the article on “Unimaginable Death” might be seen as an example of the sort of comparative histories that COVIC supports.

Paul: Exactly. “Unimaginable Death” is simply an example of the kind of analysis and reflection that can be built up from the collection. We came up with a subject – death milestones – and we found a rich set of examples to discuss and learn from. Now we’re thrilled that Nightingale is giving us the chance to present this work to your readers. We hope it will inspire not only discussion but more articles and projects that use this material and this methodology.

JF: One of the challenging aspects of the pandemic was our inability to control the spread of the virus and the resulting waves of infections which lead to inevitable milestones. Did your team have some kind of reaction to the nearing of the milestones? Were you following certain papers and search results or was it more anticipatory?

Paul: I don’t think milestones are inevitable. We mention examples of countries where one-hundred-thousand deaths, half-a-million deaths go by and no data visualization milestone appears online, as far as we can tell. 

I went through my emails to Hugh and Liuhuaying and found that the first set we shared in December 2021 started “from Italy in March 2020 through Germany in November 2021”. Once we had that set I began to anticipate later milestones that would occur in the US and Spain the following year. Liuhuaying found the Chinese examples that were a response to the first surge of deaths. I did search for visualizations in the Spanish media when that country crossed the hundred-thousand mark. And like everyone in the world, we anticipated the one-million event in the US. We all anticipated that we could not complete the essay until after they appeared.

JF: The dataviz world isn’t that big, did your team have a direct dialogue with any of the journalists featured in the collection? 

Paul: I know Liuhuaying and Irene de la Torres Arenas from teaching at the IDV program. They were both kind enough to speak to my class during the first pandemic summer. Irene was working at BBC doing COVID-19 visualizations, though now she is designing for FT. We didn’t talk about death milestones or the specific challenge of representing large numbers at that time. Six months later Irene led the team that produced the 1-year milestone that visualized COVID-19 data as flowers.

Liuhuaying: I had asked Spe Chen, a data visualization designer at The Straits Times who designed the floral icons for the example “Remembering the 5 million lives lost to Covid-19” about her inspirations, especially whether she was aware of the BBC “petal” design. 

She was impressed by Poppy Field – Visualising War Fatalities and searching for visualizations representing the death toll. Inspired by Japanese altars, she decided to make flowers and tried many types of flowers. It was only in the middle of her flower ideation that she saw the BBC “petal” design.

Paul: We heard from several designers indirectly. We learned the backstory of The New York Times examples from the Times Insider series, The Project Behind a Front Page Full of Names and On the Front Page, a Wall of Grief. Later there was Clare Santoro’s Nightingale piece about Alyssa Fowers’ “Cut Short”, and the PolicyViz podcast interview with Aliza Aufrichtig about “Voices of a Grieving Nation.” I also learned about “1 million U.S. COVID-19 deaths” from another PolicyViz interview with Danielle Alberti, and it is also discussed in Behind the Scenes with Axios Data Visualization in Nightingale.

JF: After collecting so many charts about our inability to visualize such huge numbers of human loss, do you each have examples that you find effective?

Liuhuaying: It depends on how we define the effectiveness in this context. I love the three projects in flower examples because of their high emotional values. The flower element linked to funerals and memorials across cultures provides an extra function to the charts: compassion and consolation.

Those examples of dots also provide emotional values by triggering our awe of life: so many lives passed away, sorrow, life is vulnerable, and we need to be more serious about the situation. And aesthetically, both expressed the beauty of lives. However, as always expected in war memorials, we would like to send a bouquet of flowers, and may the deceased rest in peace.

Paul: When Hugh introduced the metaphor of the Forest and the Trees into the essay, it helped me see the fundamental design question that everyone had to face. The designs are not about death and loss, per se. They are about communicating quantities and what quantities are made from. This can be done by carefully labeling the axis of a line chart or area chart. That thought process disengages the visualizations from the emotional experience. And then I recognized that the ones that moved me personally were the designs that re-engaged my emotions by playing with expectations. The designs that ‘violated the grid’ either literally — the death spike on the US map that went through The New York Times masthead — or figuratively by shapeshifting from bars to dot swarms — both the NBC “Seeing the Scale” and The New York Times “How America Reached One Million” do this while engaging the user in parallax scrolling – or animating changing numbers to mimic organic growth – like the unfolding flower petals of the BBC and The Straits Times animations.

Hugh: Building on Paul’s comments, part of what intrigued me about this project — looking at the ways COVID-19 deaths are represented and the ways milestones were marked — was how this type of situation has been addressed before. The AIDS Memorial quilt is an amazing example. Also, the Vietnam War Memorial.  And the Stolpersteine (stumbling stone) memorials in Germany, more than 90,000 small brass plaques place on or near the homes of victims of the Nazis. (See “How Germans Remember the Holocaust” in The Atlantic) These memorials make each individual uniquely visible while also placing the individuals (and the viewers) in the context of unimaginably large numbers. They evoke a mixed set of emotions: awe, wonder, horror, despair, guilt, and more.

JF: How do you want our community to use an essay like this? Did you have any design intentions as you were writing it?

Paul: We want designers to look at these examples and ask themselves hard questions. Should visualizations of death milestones afford mourning? Should they be vectors of social change? Should they impress us to behave in ways that reduce the spread of COVID-19 death? I think the examples in COVIC demonstrate that the data visualization community has collectively said ‘yes’ to all of these questions. 

I watched a talk by Mushon Zer-Avi last night. Mushon gave this keynote, Friction & Flow — a Design Theory of Change, at the Better World x Design conference in Providence RI. He makes interesting use of ‘lessons from the pandemic’ in his talk and builds on the distinction between affordance and signifier.

As Mushon built the distinction between activism that focuses on signifiers (occupy wall street) vs activism that focuses on affordances (canceling debt), I thought we could apply something similar to the death milestones. The visualizations that are clearly assembled from individual stories, whether those stories are represented by a single sentence, or a phrase, identifying a ‘type’ of person, or presenting an audio portrait, are affording our personal confrontation with loss.

The visualizations that describe what ‘the country’ or ‘the world’ has lost as a quantity, compared to a line of buses or the population of a city, reaching this point on the Y-axis, spread across time, distributed in our collective geography, are generating signifiers. They signify the quantities they represent. They do not afford our engagement in the loss of life they are made from. Or maybe, as Liuhuaying says, they do when the signifier invokes an affordance that we understand, such as placing flowers on a grave.

We want people to recognize each other’s work and build on the patterns we observed. 

JF:  How can readers find the examples you discuss?

Printing the essay as a supplement to Nightingale Magazine, Issue 2, has many advantages. It affords everyone the opportunity to see these images side by side on the printed page. But a disadvantage is that we could not print the links to the original stories for each of the 41 examples. This online interview affords us that chance. 

Let me offer everyone this table with the story titles linked. I hope people will use this to explore the examples in context and experience the interactivity, animation, and audio found in many of the pieces.

For more visualizations, please visit the COVID-19 Online Visualization Collection (COVIC). 

Other articles by the authors: 

• The Pandemic That Launched a Thousand Visualizations
• COVIC: Collecting Visualizations of Covid-19 to Outline a Space of Possibilities
• Trails, an interactive visual landscape in collaboration with Dario Rodighiero that combined the image collection into a 2-D space

The post Behind the Scenes of “Unimaginable Death” appeared first on Nightingale.

The project is part of a growing body of urgent visualization work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zhou has worked as a data journalist for about six years, and can’t remember a time when data and visual journalism played such an important and consequential role. “For every piece, the stakes are higher,” she said.

For Zhou, the NYT visual story exemplifies the stakes and complexity of this moment. The piece visualizes air traffic data and traces a number of known COVID-19 cases to show that travelers carrying the virus from China got to the U.S. well before President Donald Trump implemented the travel ban.

Yet the piece came out around when Trump started calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus.” The European travel ban had been erected a week before. Positive cases and deaths were increasing daily. Conspiracists posited that the virus was man-made in a lab in China. Anti-China and anti-Asian sentiments were brewing.

This context led to very different receptions to the piece in different circles of data journalism. Many of Zhou’s Chinese journalist friends considered some of the design choices to be insensitive and felt that the reporting and framing essentially backed up Trump’s claim. But the strong visuals left a different impression on Zhou’s friends in the U.S. In addition to praising the quality of the presentation, they got the message: The travel ban came too late to prevent the spread of the virus. The administration should take the blame.

Zhou has been tracking and visualizing data related to migrant communities, global mobility, and immigration policies around the world for years now, most recently at Quartz. She has produced award-winning visual stories on domestic and international news. In another example of crisis data reporting, Zhou built a database of deaths from Hurricane Maria with reporters from The Associated Press and Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and visualized how government inaction led to continued deaths long after the disaster.

I was fortunate to get to speak with her about her extensive experience, unique background, and her perspective on data and visual journalism during the pandemic as a journalist from China based in the U.S.

What were the main critiques you heard about the “How the Virus Got Out” visual story?

My data journalist friends in China had been reporting on the pandemic for two months when the piece came out in late March. It wasn’t news to them that the virus spread from China abroad. So when they saw the story, they noticed the design choices and questioned the motives behind it rather than focusing on the information.

One criticism is the use of color. The piece used saturated red to represent people carrying the virus, a typical choice under normal times, but can be seen as dehumanizing now. Also, the number of travelers is much bigger than those carrying the virus. Using particles of similar sizes to represent travelers and positive cases exaggerated the latter. They warned that these design choices would lead to biased conclusions.

The visual provided support for terms like “Chinese virus” and “Wuhan virus” and they worried it would lead to discrimination toward a geographical location and groups of people. They wished The Times had exercised more caution producing the story.

Why do you think two groups of people reading the same visual journalism piece could leave with completely different takeaways?

Despite the same data and visual presentation, the piece triggered people differently. The same data can be used to back the argument that China should take the blame as well as that the US did a poor job in preventing it. Data alone is perhaps neutral and objective, but when we decide what to show and how to show it, data can quickly be weaponized to serve a particular narrative. We have seen this happen again and again during the pandemic.

It made me realize that we need to be more careful in our choices of selecting, analyzing, and presenting data. Even though the majority of the target readers are fine with a story, it should not be framed in a way that harms vulnerable populations. I don’t think it’s the intention of the creators to incite racism or hatred. But impactful stories may lead to unintentional consequences.

It’s a delicate balance between presenting information and nudging readers toward one conclusion or another.

I think it’s a journalist’s responsibility to distill massive data into digestible narratives. Leaving information as is wouldn’t do it. As for this piece, I think The Times did an amazing job packing so much information into such a compelling scrolling experience. Unlike other popular means of presenting data on travelers, the smooth animation of particles really gives the audience an intuitive understanding of the initial spread of the virus. It’s an undeniable piece of art with stunning technical details. I feel like the creators focused more on that, didn’t try to nudge readers one way or another, and pretty much left the information as is.

You mentioned this is a recurring problem during the pandemic. Why so?

We are faced with an invisible virus. Everyone wants to have concrete information that they can take a hold of. We want to know why it happened, what we should do. Data — as many problems as they have — calm people down. Data and visual stories become traffic drivers! Stories that back or challenge people’s existing beliefs, especially on controversial topics, get tons of clicks.

One popular type of charts I’m sure everyone has seen is a good example: for a while, charts that tracked the trajectory of COVID-19 cases by country popped all over social media. They were usually in colorful spaghetti lines with a logged y-axis. It left people with the impression that countries were competing with one another to “flatten the curve.” One could easily call out winners and losers. But the reality is much more nuanced: jurisdictions used different methodologies to report cases and had different testing capacities. Comparing case or death numbers across countries in most circumstances was inaccurate and irresponsible. One might’ve wished that these charts would lead to “losing” countries learning from “winning” countries their “winning” strategies. Instead, these visuals inspired policies like travel restrictions. But people loved these charts! Seeing ourselves in a competition is exciting. Data journalism feeds people’s emotional needs. Perhaps to certain extent, we data journalists are complicit in some of the racist and xenophobic sentiments that have arisen from this information.Ten Considerations Before you Create another Chart about COVID-19To sum it up — #vizresponsibly; which may mean not publishing your visualizations in the public domain at all.medium.com

There must be some examples of good uses of data and visuals during this crisis?

Absolutely. As we wanted to understand how it happened, what we could do now, a lot of it has to be explained with scientific knowledge that the public does not have. Visual journalism helps digest complex information into compelling visuals. It feels old now, but — the iconic image of “flattening the curve” effectively conveys the message that social distancing isn’t about reducing cases, but about saving lives by keeping case numbers below the capacity of the healthcare system. The image democratized the knowledge epidemiologists had had for years, and helped build support for social distancing.

How have past projects you’ve worked on prepared you for visualizing the COVID-19 crisis? What have been the greatest challenges for you, or things you felt less prepared for?

I think this is truly a special moment for data journalists because data all of a sudden became so interesting to people who hadn’t felt that way before. From admin data of regular releases to personal data owned by private companies, you pick a dataset and you get an abnormal chart, a news story.

I’d been tracking data related to immigration and global migration, which became a huge area of focus in this pandemic because of the travel restrictions and changes in immigration policies. The leads and datasets I have followed became a source of new stories. When the U.S. unemployment figures came out, I wrote a story on the outsized impact on the immigrant community by analyzing occupations of immigrants using data from the Census American Community Survey. There’s a cool dataset on how many countries one has visa-free access to based on their passports. I visualized the impact of the pandemic on the power of passports (more powerful passports got hurt more). In another story, migrants losing jobs in high-income countries send back home less money, resulting in a drop in remittance income (and GDP from external transfers) in low-income countries.

The rapid news development is both a blessing and a huge challenge for data journalists, though, because it takes time to collect, analyze and produce a visually compelling story. Most of the data in the field of immigration and migration aren’t timely. They are collected by national governments and released at a monthly, quarterly, or even yearly schedule with at least a few months of lag time. Data from private institutions come with their own biases and privacy concerns. It happened a few times that I had an anecdotal story, but there wasn’t enough data yet to back up my observation.

Will the pandemic change the way data journalists work going forward?

One key thing the pandemic taught all of us is that we need to have empathy working with data. This crisis has reminded us that now when we work with numbers, we need to be aware of the humans behind, be it positive cases, death counts, immigrants, healthcare workers, or unemployment figures. They are very likely someone close to us. These humans will be impacted by the decisions we make related to the data. There might even be immediate policy responses. When the Times set a thousand names in small types on the front page to represent the 100,000 COVID-19 related deaths in the U.S., it felt personal and emotional. Rich and dramatic data points have emerged from the pandemic and can help shape public perceptions in important ways. What sets apart the great work from the good ones is the ability to empathize and humanize.

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