A great infographic is an instant revelation. It can compress time and space. (Good gosh – Usain Bolt is that much faster than all the other 100-meter gold medalists who’ve ever competed?) It can illuminate patterns in massive amounts of data. (Sure, we’re spending much more on health care and education than our grandparents did. But look how much less on housing.) It can make the abstract convincingly concrete. (Which player was ESPN’s SportsCenter most discussed during the 2012 football season? Tim Tebow — and by a colossal margin. Seriously?)

These intriguing revelations come from a short trip around The Best American Infographics, 2013. Spend serious time poring over graphs, pie charts, bar charts, flow charts, timelines, interactive diagrams, maps, cut-away diagrams, and narrative illustrations, as Gareth Cook did to compile the collection, and you’ll come away with more than your share of these mind-bending moments – and a wide-ranging view of what infographics can do. A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Cook is a regular contributor to NewYorker.com and Scientific American Mind.

The most compelling infographics, he says, mine relationships among overlooked variables to tell you something unexpected and get you thinking. (Who knew it takes an annual income of $908,000 to break into the top 1% in Stamford, Connecticut, but only $609,000 in New York City — and just $558,000 in pricey San Francisco?) The least effective confuse you (the food pyramid), overwhelm you with data (nutrition labels), or are just plain boring. I recently asked Cook to share his thoughts about what makes an infographic particularly persuasive.

What’s special about the way infographics make their case?

Infographics have an emotional power because they can show you an idea — or a relationship, or how something works — very quickly. People respond to that. A persuasive infographic surprises the viewer. It moves them in some way and makes them want to keep looking at it or show it to other people.

Did you see commonalities in the ones you found most convincing?

First, I’d say, they all have a clear focus. The designer has gone in and removed all the extraneous details so you see just what you need to understand the message behind it. And yet the best ones also have a kind of openness – the person who’s done it is transparent about what data they’re using. That can be tricky because you need to give people a sense of all the data that’s out there, and enough context, without overwhelming them. In the best cases, viewers feel that they are the ones stepping in and making the connection because they can see the bigger pattern naturally emerging from what you’re showing them.

Can you give me an example?

Take a look at the first infographic of the collection. It’s very simple. It starts with a question: “Which Birth Dates Are Most Common?” And what we see is a chart that shows every day of the year in various shades of a single color. The darker the color, the more babies were born on that day in the U.S.

It’s effective because you can see all the data for the entire year, and yet the actual relationship emerges very strongly. You immediately see the dark band running through July, August, September, and into October. It’s very clear that more people are being born then.

Once you’ve seen the main relationship, you can look at other things, as well, which is very satisfying. You can see, for example, on July 4th and 5th there’s a sudden drop-off in people being born, presumably because it’s around the holidays — you can see the same thing around the Christmas holidays. But then if you look over at February 14th there’s a dark island where a lot of babies are being born. So you can see the main relationship, but then you can also do some exploring.

That’s an important part of its persuasiveness: You want to show someone something, but you also want to give them a sense that they’re free to move around and find their own relationships. When they do, they’ll have confidence that you really are giving them the whole story.

In his introduction to the book, David Bryne talks about the power of infographics to let us see the invisible. He’s thinking mainly of cutaway diagrams, as an explanatory tool, but I imagine that can be an effective tool of persuasion as well.

Sometimes people don’t believe you because they can’t relate to your argument or they can’t understand it. Infographics can make an abstract subject concrete – let viewers put their hands around it. One of the 10 interactive infographics in the book does this especially well. It shows carbon emissions in New York City in real time, representing each ton of carbon dioxide as a giant blue sphere.

In 2010, as we’re told in the introduction, New York City added the equivalent of 54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That’s two tons every second. As you watch, the giant spheres emerge from the ground and start to float upward, two every second. You can see how much they build up over time. By the end of a day, the pile has reached the top of the Empire State Building. It’s amazing; you get a visceral sense for how much pollution that is.

Can you give me an example of an infographic that’s good at boiling down a mass of big data?

One is the Better Food Label, which Mark Bittman and a team of designers at the New York Times came up with. Look at the food label on your breakfast cereal in the morning and you see this overwhelming amount of data – vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, all these percentages, two columns, with and without milk. It’s hard to make sense of it all. Imagine someone at the grocery store trying to decide between two products: Which is going to be better for me and my family? It’s just too hard to get the answer.

So they came up with a chart designed to address just a few basic questions that someone might want to know when trying to decide how good this food is. How healthy is it nutritionally? How free is it from possible contaminants? How safely was it produced, environmentally? And when you look at their label, you can take in all of that information in two or three seconds. (Click to see a larger version of the image below.)

This is something infographics are naturally designed to do – give you the gist of a really big data set. I think this is one of the reasons why we’re seeing infographics used in so many different realms right now.

I know you’re talking to a number of business groups while working on next year’s collection of infographics. What are some of the ways forward-thinking businesses are beginning to use them?

Certainly, businesspeople are working with designers to develop infographics that present ideas. But more broadly, they working with them to help solve problems. People adept at creating visual solutions bring a different basic set of questions to bear. In considering a data set, they may say “Oh, we can look at this unusual variable and see how that changes over time.” Or they may come up with a new way to explain something to a customer who just can’t seem to understand your current pitch.

I was not at all anticipating this when I set out to do this collection, but I’ve definitely heard from readers who use this as a source book. When they have a problem they flip through it and may notice something that gives them an idea they wouldn’t have thought of before.

Many of the infographics in this collection are pretty funny. If you are in the serious business of trying to persuade people of something, do you see a role for humor?

I think it’s often the case that when people are designing something to persuade, they forget the importance of whimsy. Humor opens people up and makes them more willing to hear messages they might not otherwise reject out of hand. When you’re working really hard on designing something or making something clear, it’s very easy to lose that sense of fun yourself, and the work shows it. You want your audience to sense that at a certain level you are enjoying this. A lot of the pieces in this collection just make me smile.

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 4/22/2014.

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