As a follow up, if you were designing an infographic for an audience of academics, would you be more generous with the exposition, or do you think most people respond to visual storytelling with roughly the same level of text tolerance?
Would I give an academic audience more to read? Only if I wanted to bore them in return for their having made me read Silas Marner.
The designer Mario Garcia has always said a reader will read about any subject if the story is displayed well.
I think the same applies to the “story” (text) in a graphic. If the subject matter is compelling and if the text is enlightening — and well-written, well-edited, and well-sourced — the audience will begin reading.
Whether the audience continues reading is up to the person who produced (reported, researched, and wrote) the text.
Few readers want to read more than they have to read, no matter romania cell phone number list what platform or device. My hunch is that if a graphic is text-heavy, its visual isn’t doing its job well and-or the writer didn’t know when to stop writing.
by Sam Ward for USA Today
Sometimes having lots of words is inevitable. What techniques do you think make a particularly wordy infographic work?
One technique? Editing.
Any text ought to omit needless words, as Strunk and White urge. Text ought not to grow in order to compensate for a weak visual.
Look closely at the visual part of the graphic.
Is the visual doing its job? Instead of additional words does the graphic need improved visual detail?
Seriously: If a graphic must be wordy I recommend dividing the edited text into segments, which can make the text easier to read. And if a graphic requires really long text, I recommend that the designer and editor use a text-only narrative — a story! — besides the graphic.