No matter what part of the internet you hang out in, you can’t have missed the massive rise of infographics over the last few years. From tax to videogames to politics to pets, every subject has had its infographic.

With every popular trend comes a backlash from the in-crowd; “I was into infographics before they were cool”. In the heydey of Nicholas Felton’s annual reports, designers loved infographics. Now that infographics are ubiquitous, designers say they’re passé.

We should differentiate constructive critique from blanket statements.

Some of the common critiques of infographics -- that they confuse more than enlighten, that they overemphasise visual beauty over clarity of information, that many amount to just a bunch of big numbers with no real graphing, that they’re largely derivative -- are valid critiques for a lot of the infographics out there. These critiques have become shared wisdom amongst designers and I think that infographics generally have improved as a result.

But it’s a mistake to confuse individual criticisms with sweeping condemnation. The massive popularity of infographics is new, and as such, the form is still developing. We should be fostering it, constructively criticising it, and helping it to grow -- not rubbishing the whole medium.

It’s not really a surprise that infographics are so popular with the general public. They’re a very visual form of communication compared with your typically text-heavy blog post (like this one!). They’re quickly digestable. They’re fun. They’re easy to share. These are the same values that attracted designers to infographics in the first place -- it would be a shame to abandon the format now, just because it’s become widely popular. In fact, this is a great time to push the practice further, to create better infographics, and to explore the frontiers -- for example, by adding interactivity and dynamic information or motion graphics into the mix.

I think it’s helpful to distinguish infographics from data visualisation. Infographics are simply the graphical representation of information -- illustrations and other non-graph visuals are still valid in an infographic. Data visualisation is the more specific representation of data. Data visualisation should always communicate in a straight-forward manner, like a graph. Infographics can be more playful. 

There’s a lot of exploration to do yet.