Randy Krum's Blog, page 41

Easy Longboard Buyer's Guide

If you are new to the longboard scene, or just need a little help learning exactly what you need, the Easy Longboard Buyers Guide infographic from Longboard Reviews could be a life saver. This cheat sheet tells you the differences between the board styles, wheel sizes, wheel hardness, and deck length.

Thinking of buying a longboard? Use this easy-to-follow guide to discover exactly which is the best type of longboard for the riding style you enjoy.

Need to know what trucks, deck or wheels to buy? This guide will help you with that too.

If you are new to longboarding then all the different types of decks, trucks, wheels and bearings can be quite daunting. It seems like there is a minefield of choices out there. Do I want hard wheels or soft wheels? A concave deck or a drop-through deck?

Accidentally buy a slalom board for cruising and you’ll be in trouble!

In my guide (on the left hand side) I have made it really easy for you. Simply decide which type of riding style you want to do and I’ll show you exactly what type of board to buy.

Once you have done that, head over to my reviews page and discover which is the best longboard on sale at the moment for your needs.

This is a really good side-by-side comparison style design. The mix of actual photo images with the illustrations to visualize the data works very well, and adds a lot of credibility to the design.

The URL in the footer, should be the link to the infographic landing page so readers can find the original full-size version. The infographic is nowhere to be found on the front page, which would make readers frustrated by trying to search the site.

Thanks to Jon for sending in the link!

Who's Going to Malofiej 23?

The Malofiej 23 Workshop days will be March 15-18, 2015, and the Infographics World Summit conference will be March 18-20, 2015. Malofiej 23 will be held this year in Pamplona, Spain by the Spanish Chapter of the Society for New Design (SNDE). The line up of speakers looks amazing! I’ll be giving a talk, but I can’t wait to hear some of these other fantastic speakers!

Here’s the link to download the conference program PDF:

This year I have will have the honor of both speaking during the conference, and acting as a judge for the Malofiej Awards. I’m putting together a new presentation titled “The Seven Deadly Sins of Infographics Design” that I will present during the conference portion.

If you have plans to attend the workshop or conference, let me know and we can arrange to meetup.

Sleeping Habits of the Rich & Famous

Even though we are all told that the recommended amount of sleep is 8 hours, everyone seems to function differently on the same amounts of sleep. The Sleeping Habits of the Rich & Famous infographic from Big Brand Beds introduces the sleep cycles of famous and successful people. I guess one sleep cycle doesn’t fit all!

We’re always told about getting a regular, solid eight hours’ sleep when it comes to being productive and successful, but not everyone follows this seemingly sound advice. Some of the most famous, successful and driven people throughout history have had some very strange sleeping habits - from micro-kips to sleeping in phases. We’ve got the oddest rich and famous sleeping habits in this new infographic.

There’s no way I could work with the staggered sleep patterns of Thomas Edison or Leonardo Da Vinci.

I like this design with simple time scales to show the sleep patterns and the series of circles to show the total number of hours per day. The visualization is repeated for each person, so once you understand the first one, you can easily understand the rest.

The design should have included the URL directly to the infographic landing page in the footer so readers can easily find the original, full-size version when they see the infographic on another site. Since they used a blog post as the infographic landing page, it will get shuffled down the blog page quickly as they post additional content. Don’t make your readers hunt for your infographic, or they will just give up and move on.

Thanks to Dave for sending in the link!

The Massive SciFi Starship Size Comparison Chart

The massive SciFi Starship Size Comparison Chart is one of my favorite infographic design projects. Designed by Dirk Loechel and shared on DeviantArt, this is a project he has been working on for years. I posted an earlier version of his design in 2013 here which was hugely popular. Dirk’s notes claim that this may be the last update.

The last update

For real this time: This is the final major content update, though if there are issues I’ll still fix them. I also haven’t forgotten I wanted to vectorize the writing. It’s still on the radar. But content-wise, I think that is about all I can put in. 

Also, I added the ISS. For scale. It’s on top, with a yellow frame so it’s relatively easy to find.

Lots of errors fixed, lots of new ships too. Well, off for now, but I’ll be replying in the comments more or less regularily. 

This is probably at least for the forseseeable future the last round of adding ships. I have pretty much all I wanted now (excepting some old scifi, and many Anime series, which tend to not have many usable images). Lots of new content.

And that’s it for now. Enjoy the new-and-improved chart! 

This is one of the visual designs that clearly demonstrates why visuals can be much more effective than text descriptions. Especially when it comes to comparing size and scale. You just don’t comprehend the scope when someone tells you that the Star Wars Executor Class Super Star Destroyer is 19,000 meters long. You have to see it in comparison to something you already know.

The images on DeviantArt are high enough in resolution, that you can download and print it out as a poster yourself to hang on your wall. The full-size poster resolution is 4,268 x 5,690 pixels. Most of the ships are clustered by franchise (Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, Eve, Warhammer, etc.). As a reality check, the International Space Station (ISS) is included for reference.

Found on Geyser of Awesome, Nerd Approved and Nerdist

The Evolution of Spawn

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The Evolution of Spawn infographic is a fantastic design. Not fan art, this official infographic was designed by Todd McFarlane, Creator of Spawn and Co-Founder and President of Image Comics!

From Todd’s Facebook post:

THE EVOLUTION OF Spawn!!!!!

With Spawn issue #250 coming up at the end of the month…. I thought it would be COOL to put together all the different costumes Spawn has had over the years.

And if you’re doing the math, that’s 24 YEARS. TWENTY-FOUR!!!!!!!! It’s cool to look back and see how things have changed since 1992….it’s hard to believe we’re already coming up on our #250th issue.

Thanks for all your support over the years!!! I’ll be doing a giveaway with these, soon.

TODD

P.S.- There have been a few requests for a downloadable poster (and higher res)… You should be able to download the poster from this link: https://flic.kr/p/qKcR9q

Found on GeekTyrant

The 6 Principles of Design

The 6 Principles of Design is an elegant design that visually shows the readers many of the ways design can visually communicate information. Designed by FOLO, a firm in Ahmedabad, India.  

This infographic visualises the six guiding principles of Unity/Harmony, Balance, Hierarchy, Scale/Proportion, Dominance/Emphasis, Similarity & Contrast. How one applies these principles determines how successful a design may be.

Simple colors, minimal text and white space work together to tell a clear story.

Took me a while to find the original design. The footer should include the URL directly to the infographic landing page to make it easier for readers to find the original. Most people that share infographics, don’t include the link back to the original. They just share the image file.

Thanks to Peter Sena for pinning on Pinterest!

The Anatomy of the Perfect Sales Presentation

Good infographics tell stories to the audience, and you sales presentations should too. The Anatomy of the Perfect Sales Presentation from Clemence Lepers (@PPTPOP) uses an infographic story to help people learn to tell better stories with PowerPoint. Very meta isn’t it?

You’re not gonna like it, but if you’re willing to start making some solid sales presentations that’ll help you generate more business, you’ll have to print the next sentence in your brain. Nobody cares about you. I repeat, nobody cares about you.  People care about how YOU can solve their problems and deliver the outcomes they are interested in. To grab prospects attention and close more sales, you need to bring consistent, clear solutions to their problems.

Easier said than done, right?

To help you with that, I’ve created an infographic that breaks down the key elements of a highly effective sales presentation. Follow them, and you’ll be set to get your value proposition across, communicate a compelling message and convert more prospects.

There’s a structure to a story, no matter what medium is being used to tell it. Don’t just throw your data and talking points into an infographic (or a presentation). Tell a story that makes your data meaningful to the audience.

The Salesforce Economy

The Salesforce Economy infographic created by Outbox Systems is an overview of where the company is today and a little history on how it came to be.

Salesforce is a global powerhouse.  This infographic displays the Salesforce economy, including the company’s growth, global reach, timeline and more.

This design is a great visual summary of the corporate history of Salesforce. Revenue growth, global presence, acquisitions, strategic partners and an overview of apps. Here’s the link to the high-resolution PDF version. The link on their landing page is broken.

The overall design is pushing the Fair Use of the Salesforce trademark pretty far. One of the trademark infringement tests is the “possibility for confusion”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some readers walk away thinking this is an official infographic put out by Salesforce instead of Outbox.

Thanks to Darren for sending in the link!

2012 Statistics: Pennsylvania Crashes

This infographic is a very detailed look into the 2012 Statistics of Pennsylvania Crashes. Solnick & Levin, a law firm that works on cases of personal injury due to accidents, released the infographic to help potential clients understand where their case may fall in the overall state statistics.

The charts and visualizations in this infographic design are clear and very easy for the readers to understand.

However, I frequently talk about the differences between showing statistics with a data visualization versus showing them in text-alone. This is a great example, where some stats are visualized where others are not. Any of the stats shown as only text are generally considered to be secondary information by the readers because they weren’t important enough for the designer to spend the time to visualize.

My recommendation is that you should carefully choose to only include the important statistics that support the overall story in any particular infographic design.  If a data point makes the cut and is picked to be included, the designer should take the time to visualize it to make it more easily understood by the readers.

Thanks to James for sending in the link!

How to Have the Perfect Workday

How do you manage your time? The How to Have the Perfect Workday infographic designed by Alissa Scheller for The Huffington Post tries to map out the perfect schedule to maximize your productivity. 

The good news is that there are plenty of little things you can do to improve both your productivity and your happiness if you feel stuck at your desk all day.

One simple trick is to structure your time better — which includes taking more breaks. In fact, the highest performers work for 52 minutes consecutively before taking a 17-minute break, according to a recent experiment conducted by the productivity app DeskTime.

Check out HuffPost’s perfect workday below:

The doughnut chart is easily understood by readers as visualizing the complete day, and this design tells this one story in the visualization very well. Nicely done.