My last post (back in April – guess I’ll never be accused of overblogging) discussed the effectiveness of visuals in communications, and how they increase willingness to read by 80% or more. To illustrate this, I thought we’d share some real-world examples to support those thoughts.
One of our clients – Transportation Research Center in East Liberty, Ohio – is the largest independent vehicle test facility and proving grounds in North America. With this “largest” designation comes several interesting size-related facts:
And with a modest amount of “graphic” treatment, these same items become even more attention grabbing:
Another client, an exercise physiologist, gathered data for a presentation on worldwide obesity, an example of which is shown here:
We converted the tabular data to infographics to better emphasize the key points and streamline the presentation:
Another great example is something we did for a Tier 1 automotive supplier showing the changes in U.S. market share for vehicle manufacturers over the last half century. The tabular data was extremely in-depth, and unless you were a regular numbers cruncher, somewhat difficult to fully comprehend the meaning of:
Using three-dimensional graphics, we were able to clearly depict, and quickly communicate, the significance of the trends the client wanted to highlight:
In today’s info overloaded environment, if you’ve got something to say, and you’re fortunate enough to initially grab someone’s attention, you’d best make the point succinct, short and sweet. If that works, they just may ask for more – and isn’t that the real objective?
P.S. We’ve recently updated the format of the “Work” section of our site, so if you’re interested in what we’ve been up to, please give it a look. Thanks.
John Sanderson 09/14/2017
Bob-
I always enjoy your missives on design. As I have aged, and been involved in web site design, communications, and researching on the web, I have developed a bit of a phobia about font size and graphics. Let me explain: It is a given, that any color type on a black background, has a much diminished readability. Anything other than white, has insufficient contrast to be as readable as white, unless fairly large and/or bold. One of my favorite sites is terribly frustrating in this regards. It is Mac’s Motor City Garage. They have lengthy articles in 9 pt type, regular, that is grey, and semi-unreadable, unless you highlight the the desired copy. Then it is merely annoying!
Having spent a lot of time working with a dedicated CG presentation dedicated system, and the ISSCO Telegraph mainframe graphing software, it is sometimes very difficult to read the entirety of a graph, based on the style used. There is a great, thin book on the logic and effects of graphing that I have referred too as a good resource for communicating graph information. I the auto company 3D stacked column example, The FCA (and antecedents) history relative to the others is not easily discerned. If it isn’t relevant, or important, no biggie. Just depends on the purpose.
Thanks for making me rethink and consider my presentation communications. Best regards,
John Sanderson