News, the only non-violent desire that every human possess, started as hearsays, folks or to the best as government proclamations until the seventeenth century. News got democratized, structured and organized after the advent of “Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien”, world’s first weekly newspaper.
During the early days, newspapers were textual and serious yet popular. They only carried columns of text, and it took two whole centuries for the first headline to ornate newspapers, this heralded the first method of condensing information into smaller and fewer words devoid of textual pleasantries. It was followed by the use of illustrations in the year 1806 by ‘The Times’ and later as pictures during the 1880’s by ‘The Daily Graphic’.
During this same period in a parallel timeline, infographics were progressing steadily but confined mostly to science and technological illustrations. It first appeared in a book named ‘Rosa Ursina Sive Sol’ by Christoph Scheiner who used illustrations to demonstrate his findings on the sun’s rotation patterns. Later by 1786, William Playfair a political economist who used statistical graphs, charts and a pie chart in a first, to represent the economy of England in his book. However, it is Florence Nightingale, an English nurse who innovated the illustrations into infographics by merging multiple elements of visual representation through her coxcomb chart to illustrate the causes of mortality during the Crimean war.
All these developments revolutionized infographics which already started appearing in newspapers as early as 1970’s by Peter Sullivan for 'The Sunday Times'. After this, they became a prominent feature of every important story in every newspapers, so much so that the newspaper USA Today was criticized for over visualizing the news often giving importance to the visual appeal than the content.
Later into the 21st century after the digitization of newspaper production and due to the advent of vector graphics and raster graphics in computers, visualizations became more visually appealing and accommodating to data thereby a mainstay in data-oriented news stories.
Every infographic essentially possesses three parts the visual, the content, and the knowledge. The visual consists of colours and graphics, the content is the data depicted in it and the knowledge is the information behind and from it. There are two different types of graphics – theme and reference. Theme graphics are included in all infographics and represent the underlying visual representation of the data. Reference graphics are generally icons that can be used to point to certain data, although they are not always found in infographics.
During the early days, newspapers were textual and serious yet popular. They only carried columns of text, and it took two whole centuries for the first headline to ornate newspapers, this heralded the first method of condensing information into smaller and fewer words devoid of textual pleasantries. It was followed by the use of illustrations in the year 1806 by ‘The Times’ and later as pictures during the 1880’s by ‘The Daily Graphic’.
During this same period in a parallel timeline, infographics were progressing steadily but confined mostly to science and technological illustrations. It first appeared in a book named ‘Rosa Ursina Sive Sol’ by Christoph Scheiner who used illustrations to demonstrate his findings on the sun’s rotation patterns. Later by 1786, William Playfair a political economist who used statistical graphs, charts and a pie chart in a first, to represent the economy of England in his book. However, it is Florence Nightingale, an English nurse who innovated the illustrations into infographics by merging multiple elements of visual representation through her coxcomb chart to illustrate the causes of mortality during the Crimean war.
All these developments revolutionized infographics which already started appearing in newspapers as early as 1970’s by Peter Sullivan for 'The Sunday Times'. After this, they became a prominent feature of every important story in every newspapers, so much so that the newspaper USA Today was criticized for over visualizing the news often giving importance to the visual appeal than the content.
Later into the 21st century after the digitization of newspaper production and due to the advent of vector graphics and raster graphics in computers, visualizations became more visually appealing and accommodating to data thereby a mainstay in data-oriented news stories.
Every infographic essentially possesses three parts the visual, the content, and the knowledge. The visual consists of colours and graphics, the content is the data depicted in it and the knowledge is the information behind and from it. There are two different types of graphics – theme and reference. Theme graphics are included in all infographics and represent the underlying visual representation of the data. Reference graphics are generally icons that can be used to point to certain data, although they are not always found in infographics.
The success of infographics can be attributed to the fact that visuals are easy to comprehend than texts and photographs as fifty percent of the human brain is dedicated to visual functions, and images are processed faster than text.
Newsgraphics aims to complement today's newsreaders with a visual experience. Here News is presented in graphics, simple yet rich.
Newsgraphics aims to complement today's newsreaders with a visual experience. Here News is presented in graphics, simple yet rich.
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