2013 Information is Beautiful Awards

November 22, 2013 11:26 PM

The 2013 Information is Beautiful Awards Winners have been posted.

• Data Visualization Shortlist
• Infographic Shortlist
• Interactive Shortlist
• Motion Infographic Shortlist
• Tool Shortlist

posted by juv3nal (12 comments total)

Well, the website does a really piss poor job of not actually allowing me to visualise these great visualisations.

Fly me to the moon - I would love to be able to zoom in and read the text.

I love this sort of stuff but what a shiteful method of presentation.
posted by Mario Speedwagon at 5:20 AM on November 23, 2013 [2 favorites]

Based on the examples that I can clearly see, it seems to me these awards are based more on the "Beautiful" aspect, rather than whether the "Information" bits are easily understood. Which, sadly, seems to be par-for-the-course anymore.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:33 AM on November 23, 2013 [6 favorites]

This motion infographic is pretty compelling:
NYC Greenhouse Gas Emissions
posted by madamjujujive at 6:43 AM on November 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Ha. Thorzdad, you just said exactly what I came here to post. Some of these are great, but IIB really ought to focus more on the 'informational' aspect of information.
posted by graphnerd at 6:44 AM on November 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also, nothing could be more damning to this whole endeavor than a nominee being an infographic comparing Gangnam Style and the Harlem Shake.
posted by graphnerd at 6:47 AM on November 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Given the Information is Beautiful website, the awards do not surprise me. I dislike the trend toward "infographics" because it seems like mostly it's about graphics instead of "info," and Information is Beautiful is pretty much the temple of this school. (It strikes me that Information is Beautiful is read, and its artifacts produced, mostly by designers; the statisticians and scientists producing useful information are more likely to produce something like the R screenshots.)
posted by sonic meat machine at 7:15 AM on November 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

I checked it out earlier and can confirm that the number of people who had the same impression as graphnerd is equal or greater than four (4).
Sadly, information aesthetics (where form follows function) blog has stopped updating in September.
posted by hat_eater at 8:02 AM on November 23, 2013

Some of these are really good and compelling and allow you to actually see and compare information in a way that's informative. I really liked Field of Commemoration. Some of them, though, like Cost of Vaccines, takes about 3 basic facts and turns them into a giant poster that's somewhat hard to read. I liked the Hitchcock one, because it was beautiful and a little bit silly, but also presented information that was a bit different and interesting from the usual numbers about movies. I wish they'd found a better way to distinguish the lines on the map from each other, though, because it was hard to find the lines that went with the descriptions.
posted by jacquilynne at 8:05 AM on November 23, 2013

These awards are sponsored by Kantar, a group of 13 companies that collectively do client services around data analysis and presentation. Here's the 2012 winners (first year). I like the breadth of submissions they've considered but there's a pretty heavy bias towards marketing over science.
posted by Nelson at 8:54 AM on November 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Based on the examples that I can clearly see, it seems to me these awards are based more on the "Beautiful" aspect, rather than whether the "Information" bits are easily understood.

...or, for that matter, accurate.

The "Taxonomy of Comic Book Characters" has a category labelled "Anthropods," under which are listed the subcategories "Insects," "Arachnids," and "Crustaceans"; those are arthropods.
posted by Sys Rq at 12:13 PM on November 23, 2013

Sadly, information aesthetics (where form follows function) blog has stopped updating in September.

Funny you should mention that, they just now posted an update, so it looks like posting is sparse rather than completely dead.
posted by juv3nal at 12:23 PM on November 25, 2013

And another! Now I'm gonna pretend it's my doing and you can't stop me.
I meant "hasn't been updated since September" but I was being distracted by the dog who evidently was having a nightmare. And then the edit window has closed.
posted by hat_eater at 2:00 AM on November 28, 2013