2012: The Year of the Live-Data Infographic – The Revolution Will Be Visualized (In Real-Time)

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In 2011, the “infographic” went mainstream. Big time. Take a hot topic, insert data,visualize in graphic form to explain aforementioned topic and, voila, infographic.

Infographics have varied widely in terms of topic, tone and, unfortunately, quality. They’ve ranged from the mundane (Fashion Week Payscales) to the sublime (McCandless’s Billion Dollar Gram).

David McCandless, Nick Felton, and sites like Good have wowed us with profound perspectives on issues that define our time. Their work represents the infographic at its finest – an arresting visual that, in a moment, creates deep understanding or sparks illuminating shifts in perspective. Others leave me wondering if I might have understood the same message by simply reading a short paragraph.

If the best infographics augment, illuminate or clarify the ways in which we perceive our world, then there has always been an element that hasbeen missing until now: real-time understanding and live data visualization.

With our Grammy Replay infographic, Webtrends Design Lab is raising the bar for infographics. We are issuing a challenge to our colleagues in the design industry. The Webtrends Design Lab Challenge is this—henceforth, infographics should be:

  • Graphically Beautiful
  • Socially Relevant
  • …and most importantly they should feature Living Data.


A Step in the Right Direction
Our Live Grammy Replay infographic, featured on Mashable this weekend, integrates live data from the Twitter API. We search twitter for the most relevant Grammy’s data such as Grammy’s hashtags (#grammys2012 plus others), artist names and Twitter handles and album and song names, as well as other data points. We’ve been collecting data for about a week. As of Friday, February 9, we saw about 35,000 Tweets…per hour.

All this data has generated some interesting insights, which is the whole point.

For instance, early in the week Bon Iver tweeted that “he” (don’t worry – we know it’s the name of the band, not the dude) wasn’t going to the show and he rose up in the ranks. Lady Gaga isn’t a contender for a major award, but she is at the top of the list for most buzzworthy.

We can’t wait to see what happens on Sunday, and the Grammy Replay will have hour-by-hour data to tell the story.

Here at Webtrends Design Lab we live at the intersection of Data and Design. Whether from the web sites, mobile apps and Facebook pages we are tracking, or social data pouring in from Twitter or other APIs, the data that we’re immersed in provides us with a never-ending stream of insights about the digital universe and our interactions with it. Design is the language we use to communicate that insight in ways that are meaningful to our customers. Do you know what your data has to say? We’re happy to help you find out.

Take the Design Lab Challenge
Are you designing infographics? With HTML5 and all the amazing technologies out there, you have no excuse not to use live data. Our GrammyReplay is just the beginning of an era of live-data infographics and just atiny glimpse into what can be imagined and created. It’s our hope to see a fresh crop of curated, well-designed and thought provoking live infographics to tell the stories of 2012.

Take the challenge! Wow us. Wow the world. Bring data to life and blow minds. The revolution will be visualized.