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Episode #66: Randy Krum
171 Plays8 years ago
Welcome back to The PolicyViz Podcast! I’m back after a couple of weeks off–first, taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday, and then to iron out some bugs with the new PolicyViz website. On this week’s show, I chat with...
The post Episode #66: Randy Krum appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Viz Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode, I'm very happy to be joined by my friend and Texas friend, let me say, Randy Crum from coolinfographics.com and his own company, InfoNoot. Randy, welcome to the show. Thank you, John. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I suspect it's a little colder up here in Virginia than it is down there in Dallas. Yep, just a little bit. Just a little bit. You're now what, enjoying? You've got 70s or 80s?
00:00:39
Speaker
In the mix, 70s to 80s, we're now starting to drop down. We're in the 40s, but we'll start moving our way down soon.
00:00:47
Speaker
Well, it's good to talk to you again. Thanks for coming on. We've got a lot to talk about, and we also have a special giveaway coming up at the end of the show, but we'll get to that later
Randy Crum's Career Journey
00:00:56
Speaker
on. I want to start by asking you, if you could, to introduce yourself to folks. I'm sure most listeners of this show are actually familiar with your site, Cool Infographics. It's one of those data visualization websites that's been around for a while now. When did you start the site, actually?
00:01:12
Speaker
So the site started in two thousand seven and so we're quickly coming up on the ten year anniversary anniversary right so so maybe you could talk a little bit about the site how you got started in both the on the side of your own company and what drives your interest in this field. Yeah so it started in two thousand seven and i had my own examples of data is an infographics like pasted up on my office walls and a file and i was trying to figure out how blogs worked.
00:01:37
Speaker
I said well i want to just post all these cuz i'm trying to save bookmarks to all these different websites that have data is on them. I started the website and pretty quickly the website started taking off and was really driving a whole bunch of traffic and at the time i was not running my own company i was the vp of product development marketing for a consumer product company and this was sort of a side thing for me and so it really started taking off.
00:02:00
Speaker
I'm very quickly led to hey there's a there's a real need here and there's a potential business.
The Evolution of Infographics
00:02:05
Speaker
That's when i started probably in two thousand nine late two thousand and nine is when i started the company info new and started doing data visit infographics for clients.
00:02:14
Speaker
Interesting. Were these clients needing both the data analytics side or was this so early on in the game or the explosion, I guess, of data visualization that they were just interested in learning what are infographics, what is data visualization, or did you need to sort of help take them through the entire process?
00:02:31
Speaker
Um, I would say both and it still continues to be both, right? So we get some people that will approach us and say, we want an infographic, but we don't know what to do yet. And we got to, they need help picking a topic and gathering data and finding a story and then actually designing the infographic. Um, and actually it started in a lot of, uh, consumer research and consumer behavior. Like they already have done the research. They have an executive summary already written, um, you know, and they just said, okay, now we need an infographic to sort of summarize this as an executive summary.
Creating Effective Infographics
00:02:59
Speaker
And they, they exactly know what they want to visualize.
00:03:01
Speaker
Right. You have been researching and watching and tracking the trends in the infographic area and data visualizations as well. But what have you seen in the world of infographics specifically? How they change over the last almost 10 years that you've been that you've been running the site?
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah almost ten years so you know when we started out nobody knew what an infographic was even the word infographic was pretty foreign it had been you know certainly for designers at newspapers and magazines it was a back room word that they knew and love but but people online the general public had no idea what an infographic was. Oh man so the internet kinda hijack the word infographic and and it became this online thing.
00:03:43
Speaker
Over the last 10 years, I would say in 2010, it really started to explode. Infographics were going viral. It was really the birth of strong visual content marketing. Kind of funny at the time, it was more important to have an infographic than it was to have a good infographic.
00:04:00
Speaker
Right, right. And since that time, though, what has been the big change? Has it been just the popularity? Has it been the tools? Has it been everything? And how are people viewing their use? You're working with a lot of marketing and financial firms. How has the use within those companies changed the perception of the infographic itself?
Interactivity vs. Static in Infographics
00:04:18
Speaker
Yeah so ten years ago and even five years ago right it was this new unique novel thing that they would publish on their websites or blogs or when they just were starting the company facebook page or something like that it was really new and exciting and now it's still growing and companies are still using infographics left and right as part of their visual content marketing but it's just.
00:04:38
Speaker
It's just an infographic. It's just a staple along with social graphics and videos and blog posts, you know, and it's just one of those tools that they use. It's no longer just this new fancy shiny thing.
00:04:49
Speaker
Right. And are the new fancy shiny things the interactive online tools? And do you think people are pushing companies, I should say firms and not sort of the news organizations, which we know have a different sort of model and needs. But are do you find that that organizations you work with are pushing on interactivity? Is it the new shiny thing or are they pushing on it because they actually need it? I think it's more the new shiny thing, right? So we're seeing a push for interactivity or animated graphics.
00:05:19
Speaker
That kind of thing and it's it's really more the new shiny from a corporate business marketing sense there still man that they want people to be able to share it right and still far and away static graphics are so easy to share compared to trying to share or using bed code or take a screenshot of an interactive one so that you have got a visual that you can share with it.
00:05:40
Speaker
Right. And what do you find when you're working with people and they're building infographics or they're building data visualizations? Where's the stress point? Where's the choke point on their process? Is it the tools or is it the storytelling or is it actually getting the data? Where do you find most people sort of struggle in that whole process of creation?
Infographics in Modern Marketing
00:05:59
Speaker
The choke point, I think, is being focused, right? So we actually developed an infographic creative brief to try and help clients. It really sort of nailed down the scope of what it is they're looking for and what their objectives are. Because, and I would say a lot of infographics that are out there, they just sort of throw some data together and here you go, it's a JPEG file, it's an infographic. Yeah. And really, no story, no cohesiveness. And we really try to
00:06:23
Speaker
push them to determine and decide what is that key message that they want to communicate and design around that we've learned. Think about the millions and millions of page views just I've had on cool infographics and what I call the five second rule is because.
00:06:39
Speaker
You know of those millions of page views most people are only looking at infographics for between five and ten seconds they're not gonna read the whole thing they're not gonna read paragraphs of information about your company you've gotta design something that within that first five seconds they get that key message you're trying to communicate.
00:06:56
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, that is part of the thing about the infographic is that it gives you this five, 10 second view, whereas the interactivity can sometimes get you to go in and play with it, but also you lose certain people that don't really need the interactivity.
Data-Driven Storytelling
00:07:11
Speaker
Right.
00:07:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the interactivity lends itself more to what I would call the discovery side of DataViz, right? Where you're giving people an opportunity to change the data that's being displayed so that it's something that's more, you know, interesting to them personally or something that they're actually want to engage in and research versus I'm skimming the news and I want a quick summary of what's going on or a quick summary about a trend or whatever it is. And that's really where more of the static infographics shine.
00:07:39
Speaker
Right, right. Now you mentioned earlier on that one of the things you work with clients on is storytelling. And so can you talk a little bit about how you think about storytelling when it comes to infographics, when it comes to data, and how does that sort of telling those stories with data differ from what one might think about as a story, the storybook you read to your kids or the novel that you read on your commute? How do you view the differences between stories and then stories with data? Yeah, so stories with data
00:08:07
Speaker
I try to keep it simple again work you know talking about a pretty short attention span of five to ten seconds right so. You know we try to say okay what's the one thing that you want your audience to walk away with and then are we build our story around that we say okay are there pieces of data that your audience needs to understand first like some foundational information before they're gonna really comprehend this major insight that you're trying to share with them.
00:08:32
Speaker
right so we say the beginning of the story that intro might say you know and here's the general population of the planet and then the big insight is hey we crossed the seven billion people mark you know whatever that story is but you need a little bit of background information first and then you hit him with the insight and then.
00:08:48
Speaker
And a lot of infographics miss this. You've got to give them something to do with that information. It doesn't have to be a sales pitch, but it's got to be some sort of conclusion or call to action. What is it that your audience should do, whether it's visit a website or purchase a certain product or vote a certain way or call your mother and eat healthy. Whatever it is you want your audience to do, you want to lead them to making better decisions in their life with your data.
00:09:13
Speaker
Right. I mean, it's interesting. And this is always a struggle I've had with this phrase about stories and stories with data is that I sort of envision when I think about a story, I think about people or a person or a group of people, you know, you introduce the characters and they interact and there's some tension or some conflict and then again, and then and then it resolves.
00:09:32
Speaker
Whereas with stories with data is, you know, kind of a different platform, a different way to think about the way you just described it was give the audience or the reader the background and then, you know, what is the main point of the thing. But it's not quite that narrative story. Yeah, not quite. I mean, sometimes we'll try to use characters. But, you know, in a lot of cases, it's pretty much set up the problem so that when you show them the solution, it actually makes sense. And it actually provides closure to that problem you set up
Common Infographic Design Errors
00:10:00
Speaker
in the intro. And it's really that short.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah. So I wonder is like, is the word story, is that, is it a bad, is it not the right word that we always say, let's tell a story with this data, but is it, is that not maybe the right word? Maybe, but I don't know what the right word would be. Right. Because what you don't want to do is just throw a chart in front of somebody and let them figure it out. Yeah. Right. Because then, you know, you have no idea what they're going to look at and certainly no insight that you've discovered this
00:10:25
Speaker
really big learning in the data that they can use, but they may miss it if you don't try to highlight it and build up to it with this story or whatever we would call it. And you distinguish between annotation as it were on a chart.
00:10:38
Speaker
Versus, let's just call it stories for now, but I'm still not, I'm still not sure what to call it, but let's call it stories. So if I have a bar chart, for example, and you know, I have six bars and they're increasing across from left to right. And I annotate that last bar, that highest bar. And I say, Oh, this is the highest revenue in this quarter for this number of firms or something. Do you distinguish between that as annotation versus stories, or do you sort of view that as the same thing? Because you have set the stage in this whole graph, and then you've given this
00:11:08
Speaker
this point this thing that you want people to focus on. Yes i would not make a distinction between the two that we would use annotations to help tell that story but certainly in that chart design whether it's text or color or whatever right we're trying to lead the audience's attention to the major insight and whether it's you know i like to say titles matter so.
00:11:28
Speaker
you know, whether it's the title that's really calling out either the problem or we have this big insight and then you annotate in the chart so you can say look here, this is why we believe this, right? What is the biggest mistake people make with making infographics aside from let you know, let's say they have the story and you've helped them gather the background and this is the main takeaway when they actually sit down and start designing and pulling things together. What's the biggest mistake people make? Oh, I could list a whole bunch.
00:11:56
Speaker
All right, I'll give you top three. Go ahead. Top three is five. Top three. I mean, I get hundreds of submissions a week. I look at a lot of infographics of people that want me to post on cool infographics. And I would say far and away, most of the infographics out there are not very good.
00:12:12
Speaker
And so a couple of you can call pet peeves, right? So issues that I run into all the time and one is just too much data, right? They throw everything in there because they think it builds their credibility or like look at all this data we gathered and therefore were so intelligent or were so knowledgeable about this topic when all it's doing is creating clutter and making it hard to read the infographic.
00:12:33
Speaker
That might be too much data. That might be too much text. That happens a lot, too, where they want. Now that we've got their attention, let's put in three paragraphs about how great our company is or our product or something like that. The other one is, and I really struggle with this, is that people like to use big fonts for their numbers. And that doesn't actually visualize the data. That doesn't actually help your audience understand it or comprehend it. It doesn't give it in any context versus actually visualizing it.
00:13:04
Speaker
itself just isn't enough to help your audience understand that data. Right. Do you have a strong feeling on certain chart types? And of course, this first leads everyone to think about 3D or pie charts or other charts. I mean, are there chart types where you see an infographic that has a 3D exploding pie chart and you're like, nope, that's immediately going in the garbage pile? Or do you have that strong militant view on some of these things that we all debate all the time? I'm not absolutist about it. Like I don't hate pie charts no matter what.
00:13:34
Speaker
3D I'm pretty opposed to. There are like even in the class we try to do it like a brainstorm of like where would 3D be appropriate. We can come up with just a handful of places where 3D actually makes sense but
00:13:46
Speaker
Generally, a 3D pie chart just by itself is going to be bad. You probably look at these as much as I do. I mean, I can spot an inaccurate data vis just within a couple nanoseconds and that's immediately done. Yeah. I mean, I think there's also the tension there of inaccurate that you can see and then the inaccurate that the data, the author, the creator has used, they've used it dishonestly and that takes a little deeper thought because
00:14:13
Speaker
If they've done a good job of using it dishonestly, you may not even know. Oh, absolutely.
Randy's Other Ventures
00:14:18
Speaker
Right. So far and away, most people just make mistakes, right? And so the data is, it's just wrong, the data is good, but the visualization doesn't match it. Right. But you're right. It's those deceptive ones where it's accurate, but they've certainly skewed it for a specific purpose, that it takes, you know, a little bit more contemplation or insight to look at and understand what's going on.
00:14:37
Speaker
Right. I want to step away from Infographics for a moment because you have a lot of other stuff going on. You are running the local DataViz meetup group in Dallas, correct?
00:14:48
Speaker
Yep, going strong. All right, good. You're teaching at SMU. And you also have a LinkedIn group as well, right? Yeah, so there's a cool infographics group on LinkedIn, I think it's somewhere around 1800 members that we have set up and you know, LinkedIn groups are kind of interesting where we've got 1800 members of people and they, you know, consistently growing. And the intent is
00:15:13
Speaker
to be a discussion place about the craft of designing data vis or publishing data vis or marketing data vis and infographics and not be a place where people just post, hey, here's a link to my infographic. Check it out. It's not a place where people are trying to generate backlinks.
00:15:29
Speaker
So LinkedIn groups, I think, are struggling a little bit. We got a lot of members, but I would love to get more discussion out there and get more topics. It's just sort of a struggle, and I don't know if you run into this on Help Me Vis, but it's a struggle to get people to engage and really provide responses or opinions and stuff like that.
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think any of these sort of groups, they are essentially at their core, their social media. And so social media only works if, if people contribute and talk. And so I think that's the core challenge to all of these. I'm curious, the people who are involved in the LinkedIn group, do they tend to be the creators of infographics or are they the consumers of infographics?
00:16:09
Speaker
I really don't know. I know we have both in there, but I don't know which one is far and away the most. I mean, we have a lot of managers and entrepreneurs and stuff who just like to lurk and see what's going on and keep their hand on the pulse of what any new potential visual content might be. But then there are people that just want to talk about what's a better way to visualize this data or what's the optimal way to set up a landing page for this infographic that I want to publish for my company or something like that.
00:16:36
Speaker
Right, right, right, right. And so when it comes to when you're creating or when you're helpful in helping people create, can you talk a little bit about the design process? Now, many people probably know you have a fantastic book, Cool Infographics, that has parts of the design process. But for those of you who haven't read it, can you talk a little bit about your process as you go through, you've talked about storytelling and, and sketching out, but when you sit down with some data and you're saying, I'm going to make this infographic, what is your specific process
Five-Step Infographic Creation Process
00:17:02
Speaker
like?
00:17:02
Speaker
I mean, it's a five-step process that starts with that infographic creative brief to try and figure out how much is already known, whether the data's even known or not, if they know what message, things like how are they gonna publish it. So if they're gonna publish it online, those tall scrollable infographics work fine, but if they wanna stick it in a presentation or have printouts of it, you need to know that up front so that you design to a form factor that actually can print out nicely and not be too small that you can't read it.
00:17:31
Speaker
We start with that and we really dive into the data to make sure that we understand the data and this insight that the client wants to communicate. They may have the data, they may not have the data, so that may be all part of the data process.
00:17:44
Speaker
that we start out with. But once we know that and we say, okay, here's our insight, here's what we want to communicate, our next step is a wire framing process where we'll do really a sketch and it's not even trying to visualize anything yet, it's just a sketch of the flow of information which goes back to when we were talking about storytelling, right? So what's the sequence of information that the audience is going to need to understand? So there might be two or three background statistics that you need to lead with so that they have
00:18:10
Speaker
Foundation before you actually reveal this new insight that they have in the data and then what is that called action or conclusion and we would lay this out on a page in black and white with placeholders and not actually try to visualize anything yet because we don't want to to pre-determine or get people thinking a certain way yet.
00:18:27
Speaker
And then what we'll do is we'll start doing concepts, and we actually go through the exercise of visualizing the data in a handful of different ways, using different chart styles or illustration styles. Sometimes it's even try one that's lighthearted and fun and try one that's very serious and business-like, or something like that, and see what the client has a taste for. And we might do, like, here's a bar chart, but here's a tree map, or here's a bubble chart, or something like that, and really try to see
00:18:56
Speaker
Not only which data visualization style is effectively showing the data, but we also know that you don't want to have one infographic that's got nothing but 10 bar charts in it, right? We want to break it up a little bit so that when you move from one data set to the next, we actually want to change the visual style so that it's easy for the audience to know they're now moving into a new data point or a new data set and it really makes it easier for them to comprehend that.
00:19:20
Speaker
We do these three, four, five different design concepts, review those with the client, and then we move to a first draft. We'll take the best of what we liked of those design concepts and put together a complete first draft.
00:19:32
Speaker
and then iterate. So we'll have that reviewed by a third party, meaning somebody who hasn't been part of the design process so far and try and get some feedback on, are they understanding the message we want to communicate? What did they get from the infographic? And it usually goes for a number of rounds of tweaks and rearranging and changing how the database looks and that sort of thing until we get to the final product. And then create whatever publication files are going to be for that infographic or database, whether it's PowerPoint or a JPEG file or a PDF.
00:20:02
Speaker
So I have two questions. So do you find that people gravitate towards the standard chart types of pie charts and line charts and column charts? And do you try to push them toward I mean, you mentioned tree maps is a good example, sort of a not totally non standard, but it's sort of non standard graph type. But do you find people push back on those sorts of things? Because it takes them a moment to understand what what it's doing?
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah i mean everybody what i call the big three on the pie charts the bar charts in the line charts yeah home you know really sort of the assume that's the way they think is if they were gonna open up excel that's what they would create yeah home and so sometimes it's it's really enlightening when they start to see some of these other concepts and get really excited but sometimes depending on who the audience is right sometimes a look at that and go no no no no we gotta go back to a bar chart right.
00:20:47
Speaker
Right. Interesting. And what are the tools that you use? I think everybody's interested in what tools should be used. But specifically, I think more on the static side, what are the tools that you're using to piece all of these things together? Yeah. So everybody asks about tools. In fact, there's a whole chapter in the book just on tools. Right. And so what I find is that most data vis and infographic designers have some vector graphics program that's their favorite, that that's where they're going to bring everything together.
00:21:16
Speaker
whether it's building an infographic or maybe it's PowerPoint where you're going to put a presentation together or whatever.
00:21:22
Speaker
And then a handful of other database tools that are just basically in their toolbox that are tools they really like to use and it might be a couple mapping tools or a couple websites that create things like word clouds or a country map that where the states are color coded or something like that where they create those separately but then would bring them back to an Adobe Illustrator or PowerPoint or something like that when they put the final product together.
Infographic Design Tools
00:21:47
Speaker
But yeah, you could have 10, 20, 30 of your favorite just data vis tools and websites where you're going to build those separate data visualizations before you bring them all together. Right. And you are, I'm guessing, using most of the Adobe Creative Suite to bring all that stuff together? I'm actually going to surprise you and say, no, I don't usually use Adobe. I think it's generally way too big and complicated for the needs of data vis and infographics. Yeah. My background is not graphic design. My degree is in mechanical engineering.
00:22:19
Speaker
and learn design as they go, we try to use a little more lightweight tools. You know, I'll use OmniGraffle, which is diagramming and sort of a vector program on the Mac. I use that pretty much more than anything else. So for folks who aren't aware, there is, as you mentioned, a whole chapter in the Cool Infographics book about tools. And there's a whole portion of your website and a number of blog posts that talk about these tools. So folks should go out and check those out. So I think we're going to wrap up. And we have an offer for folks.
00:22:49
Speaker
Randy, you want to let people know about this special... I feel like a... Like a game show. Yeah, like a game show. We have a special offer for you on this week's episode. Go ahead, go ahead. So I'll send out a signed copy of Cool Infographics. We just got to manage how we do this on Twitter, I think is the way we decided we want to do this. And so we want to open this up and once we choose a winner, I'll send out a signed copy of Cool Infographics to them.
00:23:17
Speaker
Yeah, so tweet out what your favorite data vis tool is. And it can be for making infographics, or it can be for making interactors. Data visualization is a pretty broad term. So what's your favorite data visualization tool? And at the end of this week, we'll put all the names in the hopper, and we'll pull one out, and you get an autographed copy of Randy's book, Cool Infographics. Just tag it with the hashtag The Policy Vis Podcast, which is probably how you found out about this show on Twitter. And again, we'll throw all those names in a hopper, and we'll pull a name
00:23:47
Speaker
and you get a free book. Yeah, it's got to have that hashtag because otherwise we'll never see it. We'll never see it. And we're interested to see, I don't think we're going to be surprised at some of the things that we'll find, right? We're going to see a lot of D3 and R and Excel. And we'll see a lot of Illustrator, I'm sure, as well, and some other things. But it'll be interesting to see what the whole landscape or what a landscape looks like in terms of tools.
Book Giveaway Announcement
00:24:10
Speaker
And if we get enough, we'll create a little data for it. Yeah, absolutely. This has been great. Randy, thanks so much for coming on the show. I think we covered a lot of ground today. Thank you, John. I appreciate it. And thanks to everyone for tuning in and listening to this week's episode. Until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. So thanks again for listening.