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Type of site | Infographics & Data Visualizations |
---|---|
Available in | English |
Owner | ScribbleLive |
Key people | Vince Mifsud, CEO |
URL | visual |
Commercial | Yes |
Launched | 2011 |
Current status | Active |
Visual.ly is a community platform for data visualization and infographics. [1] It was founded by Stew Langille, Lee Sherman, Tal Siach, and Adam Breckler in 2011.
Visual.ly was inspired by the founders’ time at Mint.com. [2] As Mint's Director of Marketing, Langille noticed that the infographics posted to MintLife, the company blog, generated 30 times more traffic than a comparable text article. [3] [4] According to Langille, “we knew we were onto something big.” [5]
In April 2011, Langille, along with MintLife's Editor-in-Chief Lee Sherman and Adam Breckler, a Mint web developer, left Mint.com to co-found Visual.ly with Tal Siach, the founder of Walyou, an Israeli gadget site. [6] [7] [8] Langille states that Visual.ly works towards evolving how digital news media outlets present information, similar to how USA Today’s weather infographics transformed news outlets in the early ‘90s and how Wired’s graphic design influenced digital media in the early 2000s. [9]
In October 2011, Visual.ly announced a $2 million round in seed funding, led by Crosslink Capital, 500 Startups, and SoftTech. [1] [10] At the time of the announcement, Visual.ly had 26,000 users, 7,000 infographics, and 1 million monthly page views. [1] They have partnered with The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, AskMen, CNNMoney, and National Geographic, among other media outlets, to provide infographics and data visualizations. [1]
Visual.ly is structured both as a showcase for infographics as well as a marketplace and community for publishers, designers, and researchers. [5] The site allows users to search images through description, tags, and sources in a variety of categories, ranging from Education to Business or Politics. [11] Users can publish infographics to their personal profile, which they can subsequently share through their social networks. [12]
Visual.ly maintains a team of data analysts, journalists, and designers that create infographics and data visualizations using the Visual.ly tools. [13] [14] [15] They are currently developing a tool that allows anyone to create and publish their own data visualizations. [14] Through this tool, users will be able to gather information from databases and APIs in an automated service (meaning that users only need to specify the kind of information they want to visually display) to produce an infographic. [9] Visual.ly’s first tool, the Twitter Visualizer tool allows users to input the Twitter handles of two people, and then generates an infographic comparing the hobbies, number of followers and occupation of the two accounts. [16] [17] [18] CBC used this feature to compare leading politicians. [19]
Visual.ly’s infographics have been featured on NPR, The Huffington Post and CNN. [20] [21] [22] They were named as one of Inc. Magazine’s 10 new web tools to make life easier. [23] Their YouTube channel has received over 100,000 views. [24]
Information design is the practice of presenting information in a way that fosters an efficient and effective understanding of the information. The term has come to be used for a specific area of graphic design related to displaying information effectively, rather than just attractively or for artistic expression. Information design is closely related to the field of data visualization and is often taught as part of graphic design courses. The broad applications of information design along with its close connections to other fields of design and communication practices have created some overlap in the definitions of communication design, data visualization, and information architecture.
Delicious was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011, and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year. In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc. In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service.
Infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly. They can improve cognition by using graphics to enhance the human visual system's ability to see patterns and trends. Similar pursuits are information visualization, data visualization, statistical graphics, information design, or information architecture. Infographics have evolved in recent years to be for mass communication, and thus are designed with fewer assumptions about the readers' knowledge base than other types of visualizations. Isotypes are an early example of infographics conveying information quickly and easily to the masses.
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