3 cool web-tools for visualization geeks

Hi guys! I am back again. 

You are not going to believe what I have been doing these past couple of months! While I am in the process of summing up everything that happened in a blog post or two - take a look at the following paragraphs. Here are some cool tools for making our life more visual and visually beautiful :) Enjoy!

As it has already been mentioned in one of my really early web-notes, it's all about visualising big data now. Just think of how you browse news on the Internet or read scientific reports (I can only imagine a person sitting in a big cosy chair reading something on nuclear physics) or even your Facebook timeline. There are only a few things to catch your eye - screaming headlines, videos and pictures...mainly videos and pictures. Thus, in order to spread the message people and companies have to re-invent the wheel. Well...in a cool way. Like Vice News with their cartoonish stories Correspondent Confidential or, say, 'I am a Drop in the Ocean' project (well known yellow&blue poster symbolising ideas of freedom, democracy, mutual help and all-national support in a minimalist picture). 

Of course, all great ideas soon become the over-used ideas, or move from 'Oh my gosh so-o-o amazingly original & fresh' phase to the 'we just had too much of it'. If you want an impression of 'infographics gone completely wrong' or 'how to ruin the idea of visualisation - I found this Guardian collection of 16 useless infographics. Moreover, I decided to share this great little guide from journalism.co.uk which looks into the psychology of visualisation and the extent to which colour, form and icons influence perception of the data. 

Now that you are completely backed-up with all the basics, let me share with you something pretty:

1. Easelly 

What's that? I would call it great easy-to-use and free-to-download online tool for infographics. But the 'official' definition would be:

'easel.ly (n) - a theme based web-app for creating infographics and data visualizations'

So basically it differs from the other similar tools in terms of simplicity. Easelly offers a huuuge range, like really impressive one, of pretty and unusual themes even a child could adopt for creating a nice original infographics. Like, for instance, this free hipster theme on the left. Have you seen anything better? Hipsterlicious! In addition to the standard picture formats, you can also download. pdf version which is supposedly nice. I was going to embed this video presentation of the app, but the music in it was too annoying and I do not want to annoy my readers, so I am just going to paste this link here, so you can see for your self. However, what might actually be professionally useful is this video below which shows the way Eeaselly may be used by journalists. 

Here you go:

2. Tiff 

Speaking of hipsters: 

'I got a tattoo of the word Helvetica on my chest in an Arial. It's ironic, you know'. If you don't get this joke from a PocketHipster app - the Tiff tool will be super useful. If you do get the humour, check how much an expert on fonts you are by taking this silly test here. This article from The Industry may also shed some light on the mystery behind the two alike looking fonts. Anyway, moving on to the tool:

'Tiff (n) - is a type diff tool that visually contrasts the differences between two fonts'.

The tool may help you to decide which font to use for your blog, or simply get more familiar with the styling differences. The only potential problem I see with this tool is that it only recognises Google Web fonts, but having tried many different combinations I did not see it as a big flaw. If you really do want to compare a wider selection of fonts or simply want to know more similar tools - check Typetester (may not be that hip, but super useful as it shows you text extracts in bold, italic and other styles and allows comparing 3 different fonts at the same time). To make it a list of 3, will also share with you this font-comparer with an original name Fontcomparer %-). It does not have a wow-design, but seems super convenient. So do not forget to check it out.

3. RAW 

Ok. Now when I have tried this web-application, I want to go back to my statistics course and re-submit my lame Excel tables, pasted-in-a-Word-document graphs and other simple-looking data visualisations. RAW has been specifically designed for aesthete-sociologists, journalists and other specialists who work with data. 


'Raw (n) - an open web app to create custom vector-based visualisations on top of the amazing D3.js library through a simple interface'. 

Beautiful graphs and charts can now be made in 5 easy steps: 

copy-->paste-->customise-->export-->enjoy

Your work can be exported in vector format (.svg) or .png

And here is another video illustrating more useful features of the tool.

Raw 1.0 - Basic Tutorial from DensityDesign on Vimeo.

That's basically it. Thank you for reading :-) 

Infographics and video editing for bluffers

Infographics are being widely used by all types of companies as the new form of content. 
From the maps and cartography -  











through the road signs -

the use of icons evolved into the whole image-based stories and business reports -

This is how infographic was born, I guess. I always admired how this type of content looks and always wanted to create one my self. So here are some tips concerning infographic I would like to share.

1. It is simple

There is probably no better way to explain the big data and heavy statistics to the ordinary person except for visualising it. Easy-to-understand pictures may not only display your products, reveal key information on the company's achievements, but be an informative piece for the stakeholders and business partners.

2. A form of content and the content per se

Infographics are now quite commonly used by the marketing, PR, advertising and digital blogs and news outlets as a way of delivering complicated data (statistics, rankings, process descriptions). On the other hand, when a brand decides to create infographic, this often becomes a newsworthy story itself. Take Google, for example, who supplemented the ‘9 years of Gmail celebration’ with the colourful illustrations making the event more ‘catchy’.

3. People love infographics

Cool cat`s images and infographics (as more serious stuff) represent the two examples of the most sharable content. This is especially true among the Internet users who not as much read, but observe. While with the articles and news stories the information may be more in-depth, it only takes few seconds to get the idea of the infographics and repost the picture to your social media page.

4. Infographic cannot be too long

The blog post may be too long, so can the video, but with infographics it is more like a comics book - you want to know the end of the story. Thus, this format of content is rarely boring. So it is like bonfire, waterfall or 'another person working' - something you can watch forever. :)

5. There are so many tools to make infographics

In order to make an infographic you do not necessarily need to be a photoshop guru. There are at least 3 great free online editors to help you start visualising your content.

- Piktochart

-  Infogr.am

-  Visual.ly

6. Users love them, search engines don’t.

The biggest problem with infographic is that they are not SEO-friendly, Being an image infographic content cannot be recognized and indexed. Therefore, it`s use have to be very dosed and always supported with some kind of a pitch or a hashtag.

7. Good infographics are not so easy to make.

Even though the above mentioned programs are quite handy, they cannot compere with professionally designed ones. Therefore, I would still recomend to get yourselves introduced to the basics of picture editing.

FURTHER content visualisation 

If you want to take the visualisation to the next level, it is might be worth trying to create video.
To say the truth, I was not at all familiar with any video editors (except for the Movie Maker). 
However, I was a huge fun and frequent user of Instagram, so after they introduced the 'video option' it was my first expereince in fim making.

Later on, I discovered Vine and it was absolutely surprising how 7 seconds can make you a star or help creating successful marketing strategy .

But the service I want to share with you today is VideoScribe. If you have always wanted to create a video like this, this video editing software will be extremely useful. What it does, it makes this 'hand drawn stories' in a few minutes, so I really enjoyed the 7 days trial free version that I have installed. If this is something you would use for your content marketing, it might be worth buying though.