Cairo and Xocas in Mosaic

Sorry for being disappeared these days. You know, the summer, when you have free time you use to try life far from computers. And, also, this week we've been busy with a special about the man on the moon, the new Harry Potter movie (this graphic, in english) and other things.
That's why I'm delayed to tell you that Mosaic, the online magazine of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia) have produced a new issue with the galician infographics dynamic duo Xocas and Alberto Cairo.

They interviewed Xocas and published an article wrote by Cairo. The magazine is in spanish, so I translated the best sentences:


Xaquín G.V.: "Infographics are the brilliant blue in the feathers of a peacock"

"You have to be a good journalist, a great information visualizator and a good supervisor, you must understand and fend infographics as another journalistic genre."

"The multimedia documentarie is the multimedia journalistic genre most underused on mass media"

"Journalist with deep computer programming knowledge are very important"

"Shape should follow content. The beautiest visualizations are so not just for being beautiful, but because their shape makes the content easier to understand."

"Infographics are a hard-to-find and expensive product, but they really differenciates you from the others. The media that will know how to integrate, use and seize graphics will survive in these hostile times of crisis. Multimedia features and interactive graphics are working on NYTimes and they worked in other places before. Infograhics are the brilliant blue in the feathers of a peacock. Can you live without it? Well, if you wnat the specie to survive..."


Alberto Cairo. Visualization and knowledge. A short invitation to infographics

"Graphics works better than a table because, when give a visual shape to data, I'm creating a tool useful to accelerate (and sometimes replace) the processes the brain follow to reach its target"





"A big amount of journalists and readers think you need to draw well to be an infogrpahic journalist. (...) But it is not so for the most basic infographics (...) You can produce great maps and charts just if you draw a cow and people don't think it's a dog"

"If we consider infographics as a just-artistic discipline many people won't get involved on its ellaboration. It is a tool that everybody can handle, very important to communicate some kind of content"

"My personal method when I create infographic projects is very easy. It has three stages: research, planning and final art"

"The complexer the information gets, more basic should be the style to represent it"

"If you really want to become a communicator in this era of readers-creators, take a pencil and give infographics a chance"