I caught Stefan Fichtel for a talk about the Malofiej-competition, where he was one of the stronger judges in the jury for printed entries. Stefan is the Creative Director of Kircher-Burkhardt - overseeing the daily work of 10-15 infographic artists inside the larger company of almost 150 employees.

Infographic artists should help commercial clients
As you can see in the video, Stefan has a lot of ideas about infographic - one of the more controversial suggestions he puts forward after participating in Malofiej is the idea, that infographic artists should dig into the world of commercial work.

Like Stefan says - ‘There are millions of clients out there’ - and they all have a need to get their products communicated. You will even make your editor-in-chief happy, because he can sell your infographic services to clients in order to pay for the news - and as we know - news is hard to make money from today, so why not try it out?

Good economy or journalistic content
Interesting input, Stefan, but I’m not too sure if the typical editor-in-chief will really like this proposal. I think most of them doesn’t care too much about economy compared to the journalistic content in their paper - and mixing advertising into the newsroom will surely cause all kind of trouble. Secondly I fear that too many infographic journalists doesn’t really have the skills needed to serve a commercial client.

Maybe the odd newspaper-publisher would like to try it out, but for now I think the best solution is to leave the infographic advertising to specialized companies such as Kircher-Burkhardt.

Agencies take over responsibility of experimenting
But it is interesting that if we think of the implications of newspapers being unable to earn money and keep a decent level of staff in the infographics department, then the responsibility of exploring and experimenting with the visual language of infographics will move away from newspapers and end up with the agencies. A trend, which is already visible - and I’m not going to be surprised if we see even more premiun work from agencies in the years to come, while the newspapers are falling behind and doing work like they’re used to.

• It must be computergenerated - drawing by hand is limited to the few, who actually has the talent and can do that. Computers are for everyone, and these days we’re heralding equal access to be unique much more than we’re celebrating the truly unique.
• It must be beautiful - right now the interest is on presentation much more than the content.
• It has to be somewhat ambiguous. Describing things in black and white and sharp vectorlines is too fanatic. Blends are much better suited to describe a complex situation - and  much better to hide the fact, that the journalistic content might be lacking.
• It has to be useful for datavisualization. The trend with dataviz is nowhere near its end. To be able to stay safe in front of your screen and not having to enter reality is a luxurious situation, which has always appealed to many infographic artists.
• It need to work in onlinepresentations too - perhaps by moving or evolving over time.

All this could be read as if I’m unhappy with the new world of infographics. Well, I’m not unhappy at all - but I do see a lot of room for improvement. Like always.

The solution I came up with is particles in 3D-programs. The only downside to that solution is that particle-emitting and -sculpting are really tough concepts to learn. But it should be do-able - and I’ll start it right away, as missing the next thing can only be deadly for my company.

Solution pops up everywhere
The funny thing (and I’m sure it has been cognitively explained over and over again) is how, when you tune your mind into something, you start to see it pop up everywhere. This phenomenon happened to me again, just after I had made the decision to learn the particle techniques in my various 3D-programs.

Then I suddenly found myself at this website, where talented artist Peter Blaskovic shares his creations and tools. (click to visit). Especially his newest addition - the ability to paint with ‘flames’ fits right into my expectation of seeing graphics with an appearance that fits the current times.

Learn on the go by experimenting
Without spending time reading and rehearsing, I could just learn on the go by experimenting. Within minutes I created this nice piece. And a lot more, which was quickly cleared to give room for more experiments with this wonderful tool - and my kids wanted to try it too, and were able to make at least as beautiful pieces as I had done.

Only problem is the journalistic content, but I guess I could call it ‘Datavisualization of how my hand moved across my mousemat monday morning March 22nd, between 11:01 am and 11:03 am’. This sounds a lot like some of the weaker egocentric dataviz’s, I have seen lately.

Do we need to publish our mistakes
Maybe the easy access to various online-tools can give us the ability to play, learn and work at the same time. And if we start right now, maybe we will be ready when the demand for the next thing arrives, so we don’t have to name our experiments as infographics and publish our mistakes?

Challenge and competition
And so - I challenge you to visit the the flame tool and produce something you’ll be willing to share. Remember it is possible to attach images to your replies in this thread. Yes - Let’s go all the way, and get a competition running to produce the best infographic-related image with this tool. Deadline April5th - Please participate.

When I saw the title of Thomas Moléns presentation in the programme: ‘The Infographics Nerd’ - or in spanish: ‘El Idiota de los infograficos’- I looked forward to the show. It sounded like something different from the ‘This is me, and I made this, and then I made this’-formula of most presentations.

I wasn’t disappointed - at least not in the first half of Thomas’ presentation, where he obviously had spent a lot of time to make sure he was entertaining to the audience. His personal trailer - complete with deep voice-over and sound of choppers will be a classic in the Malofiej collective memory.

Meant as a joke to the younger girls in the audience, just before Fransesco Franchi entered the stage to do his presentation. And surely he doesn’t look like the World’s Best judges in the recent SND31. He isn’t retired either - in fact it has only been two years since he left the University.

A scared editor at first
Fransesco showed us his works from Intelligence in Lifestyle, IL - which won a lot of awards in last years Malofiej. When the magazine was launched the editor was scared of Fransescos proposal of putting a whole infographic spread in the magazine each month. But the infographics have now turned out so successful, that the editor just wants more and more - and now it is Fransescos turn to become scared.

The success of infographics in a new magazine is of interest to everyone working in this field. Especially as the two old news-magazines with infographics spreads,Time and Newsweek, both have stopped their big infographics.

A new style evolving
In the videoclip, you get a glimpse of some brand new material not yet published. Some of it especially interesting to see, as the graphics have started to evolve away from last years very stricly reserved graphics into more playful and colourful visuals. That style doesn’t really remind of anything I have seen before in news. And Franseco isn’t yet too sure if it works or not - he is still waiting for feedback.

Get a closer look via Flickr
If you want to look at Fransecos work in closer detail you can do so by visiting his Flickr-account (Click here), where he puts up a lot of his work to be able to receive some direct feedback. Be prepared to read a lot of shortliners like ‘great work’, ‘Love it’ etc. But also some corrections to the graphics can find their way into the comments.

Álvaro Valiño, Graphics Director at Público, started out with some background on his young and leftwinged paper. The graphics department at the paper is made up of young people, and they spend a lot of time working, and feel like a family there.

And quite succesful they are. The paper is growing and they’re making money (although I guess making money isn’t the measure of succes, when you’re leftwinged). Still, the money comes in handy, when you need the resources to innovate and take on interesting projects.

Most awarded printed paper in the contest
After the all Malofiej-medals were announced Alvaro tweeted, that his paper got 20 medals, and therefore is now the most awarded printed paper in the world. Congratulations.

What is the secret ingredient? Alvaro told about some of the projects,and it looks to me, as the extraordinary thing that makes the difference is the way the infographics people are part of the story all the way from the beginning - if not producing it themselves.

Appearance on national television
The ‘Frescograma’-collection, which got a gold medal, even had a special guest-appearance in a popular show on national television. Glad to notice, that I wasn’t the only one who looked at the rucksack-drawing like this - when you saw it from afar on the screen, and couldn’t read the text, there really was no doubt. Did you see it too?

I know they spend a lot of money and effort on other graphics, and I can perfectly imagine the people with a budget to keep become more than happy, when such a graphic is proposed. No expensive props, sculptors from Netherlands or trips around the world to produce this one. Only a ruler and a small amount of blueish tinted inks.

What does it say - what is the story:

Trading regionally - although globalization has created a tangled web of trade connections worldwide, most trade still takes place with neighbors in the same region, as Europe and Asia illustrate below.

Aha - so you’re dividing the world in seven areas, and when you see a certain pattern in two of them, you have your angle?

The text is inaccurate
Looking at the numbers it gets a bit worse: Asia is only really trading 49.7 percent within the region - not the ‘most trade’. But then you have North America with 51,3 percent trade inside the region, so it kind of makes up for that. But it’s still inaccurate - and you have no idea, when you see this tangled web. If you’re interested in this story you’ll need the spreadsheet to extract any usable information out of it.

No wonder Europe makes such a large bar anyway. Over here we’re divided into lots of small countries - that makes for a lot of export and import, which would never be registered in areas with bigger countries. If goods are transported the distance of 25 km from Copenhagen to Malmö (Sweden) it’s probably counted as ‘Export taking place within the region’. If goods are transported 25 km inside US or China, it would be something like ‘I went to the city and bought some goods’.

Lose your reader with long lines travelling across a spread
Back to the design: is it really such a good idea to print a tangled web of lines across a spread? When you cross the middle you’ll be sure to lose the eyes of anyone trying to follow one of the smaller lines. It’s very distracting to read a piece like this - and my guess is that no one really used this huge chart for anything else than a quick look and reading the inaccurate caption - and then moved on. Happy to know, that National Geographic uses innovative formats when presenting difficult numbers. But in no way enlightened.

Call me old-fashioned too, but I miss some visual indication of what the subject is. Unlike some datavisualizations, these lines aren’t pretty enough to stand on their own, and they could mean anything - can we have something trade-related in the visuals here as well?

Here are the numbers directly from the source WTO, if you would like to make something out of it.

Click here for an online version of the same dataset from 2005. (it’s a flash file, so can’t be linked directly - look down for the third button ‘International Trade, Money moves the world’

The online version actually works a lot better. Now you get the chance to see one region at a time, so you lose the tangled web, unless you decide to show it yourself. And you’re not crippled by running lines above the gutter between pages.