Alberto Cairo: "Brazilian infographics have less taboos"

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I think I don't need to introduce Alberto Cairo, but just in case I'll say he's a spanish infographics journalist who has become one of the most important theorical (and practical) leaders of this subject after being head of graphics at elmundo.es, teacher of multimedia infographics at the Univesity of North Carolina Chapel Hill and now director of infographics at Editorial Globo (Brazil).

He has spoken about brazilian graphics on an interesting interview in the spanish communication blog '233 Grados'. But, as a spanish blog, it's written in spanish, so here you are some of the most intersting quotes:

"I don't think Brazil has a different visual culture. It's just they have less taboos with some topics"

"In these years, brazilian infographics have taken a big step forward. Some media are investing in high level professionals"

"In Época, infographics should be considered a journalistic product. That's something new in Brazil, where graphics used to be in hands of designers and illustrators"

Javier Zarracina: "Infographics journalists are the kind or workers that multimedia journalism demands today"

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Javier Zarracina, Infographics director at the The Boston Globe, was interviewed on the spanish communication blog 233grados, which is interviewing spanish infographics journalist working around the world.

If you can't read the complete interview in spanish, here you are some quotes from Zarracina:

About the challenges at The Boston Globe
"The challenge is exploring relatively new production processes for a newsroom where we're still learning"

About infographics beyond the print product
"In this new era we're learning to work with developers, video people, database journalists and other multimedia professionals to create riche and more sofisticated infographics for each platform"

About the changes in the newsrooms
"Graphic journalists are an example of technic formation, versatility, innovation, integration and creativity. Precissely the kind of workers that multimedia journalism demands today"

About teh importace of the infographics departments in USA
"Many times, newspapers are directed by former chiefs of photography or art directors. Photo, graphics and design departments have a huge presence in the content planning"

About the future of media in Spain
"Spanish newsrooms are also in a moment of change. Mi advice for media businness is to invest in infographics. Infographics journalists can be the transformation engines for newsrooms"

Some sentences from ÑH07

ÑH07 is a summit taking place yesterday and today in Valencia (Spain), about news graphics and design. These are some of the sentences pronounced there (as I remember or as I understood them, sorry if there's any little mistake). I'll be updating them.

 Francesco Franchi, art director IL

Infographics are about combine and organize data to tell stories. (...) They're design and narrative: journalism

Jared Cocken, creative director at thewonderfactory.com

We've got to humanize information, make it nicer, more visual and easier to find

Alfredo Triviño, new projects art director at NewsCorp

Avatar, the iPad and Kinect have initiated a new era. They have been capable to transform physical actions and emotions to the digital world.

Paadín, from lamosca design studio

We believe in the balance between pure and simple graphics and pure aesthetics, but achieving this balance is a constant struggle

 Nicholas Felton (The Feltron Report)

More detailed data promote better stories

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"

Mantras: Alberto Cairo

The teacher at Chapell Hill opens a new chapter about the Peter Sullivan (in spanish). Maybe we agree or not with him, but some sentences are clear:

"The problem, which is also a big problem of the journalism infographics from its beginnings, comes when the aesthetic ambition comes before than our main targets as communicators: to make easy the comprehension and exploration of the data, to be trustworthy, to have rigor, to be accurate. Don't let the technical matters be a barrier between message and reader, but a channel to drive the first on to the second one."

Other make you think:

"We can have an invasion of visual shocking styles the next months, after having inside the message that the fashion now is to treat data on the most complicated ways if we have an excuse to use some last generation tool"

And some to have on our walls:

"We can't forget who are we talking to when we work at a general information newspaper or magazine: not to specialized audiences with a solid knowledge of the codes used to show the data, but to different kinds people. We've to challenge them, yes, and not to talk to them as fools ("my reader doesn't understand dispersion diagrams": nonsenses), but we can't go too far too fast"

To explain his ideas he gives two great examples of what is right: soldiers dead in Irak and the inmigration data.

The complete article for you, in spanish...

Mantras: Joe Lertola's maps

When I was student I worked as staff at the Malofiej awards. I was amazed knowing face to face the big names of infographics. But a bigger surprise came when I saw that those big names were also amazed of knowing their own 'infographics idols'. There I met José Juan Gámez, then Art Director at Recoletos (Marca, Expansion...), but one of those years he was very glad because he could met Joe Lertola, the part of the Time Magazine trio with Ed Gabel and Joe Zeff. They were the big masters of the 3d when it was beginning.



Why am I telling this story? Because I've just rediscovered Joe Lertola when somebody (sorry don't remember who) sent me this link where Sarah Slobin interviewed him for his maps on a cartography serial. You better read it, but here you are some sentences. Taje a look to the maps if you thought that the cartography based on databases was invented by The New York Times...

"Time has a set of scrap books that contain a clipping of every map and graphic ever printed in the magazine. I was impressed by the design and craftsmanship of many of the older maps from the 40s, 50s and 60s. They had a way of painting airbrushed mountain ranges that was striking. That inspired me to work on adding dimension and depth to the maps I worked on."



"The main thing I try to do is present the graphic information as clearly as possible. Each graphic I work on is a fresh problem. I start by trying to get a clear idea of what information we are trying to present. Then I try to apply my sense of what will look good."

Mantras: Xaquín González (Xocas)

The infographics editor of The New York Times was interviewed at the communication blog 233grados (spanish).Some highlighted (and translated) sentences:

"What is important on an infographic is what it's telling, not the visual impact"

"Graphics are not 'asked'! (...).It's about who has the decision-making capacity on if an story must be explained with a graphic. That's why we have infographics editors, and not graphic artists. It's a journalistic decision."

"When Richard L. Berke, assistant managing editor for news, interviewed me for the position, he told me that some of the best journalists of The New York Times are at the infographics department."

"The department has shown the potential of visual explanations and keep doing it. It means freedom and good laboral conditions."

"Spanish infographics have lost part of the interest in jornalism"

"I think newspapers could be saved if they notice that the resources needed for online and print are inverted."

Mantras (IV). Interactive news team

From left to right, Gabriel Dance, Matthew Ericson, Steve Duenes, Aaron Pilhofer and Andrew DeVigal

Sentences (and photo) from the section Talk to the newsroom of nytimes.com


"Good interactive design means a lot of different things. (...) I think they're successful for a number of reasons, but certainly one of their achievements is to make it very clear to readers what to expect when interacting with the site."
Steve Duenes

"Readers don't want to spend a lot of time figuring out how something works. Even when there's a lot of data, the interface should be designed so that the content is easily accessible"
Steve Duenes

"The guiding principle when developing an interactive is usability. (...) And if people aren't looking at the content, it doesn't really matter how "cool" the interface is"
Gabriel Dance

"There are two incredible resources I have available to me at The New York Times: the journalists and our readers. Lately we've been exploring different ways to play to the strengths of both groups. It's a delicate balance, we want to exercise our journalists' strengths (reporting, informing, storytelling) while at the same time allowing our readers to participate, and if possible, contribute."
Gabriel Dance

Mantras (III): Aron Pilhofer

I read on Alberto Cairo's webpage about this interview with Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive Newsroom Technologies at the NYT. These are some of the sentences I will keep on mind:

"In terms of what makes a powerful interactive, I think it depends on the story, obviously, but the best ones I believe are the ones that are truly … interactive. That term is widely used to describe a lot of web features whose level of interactivity is limited to the user clicking on a button and watching things move around the screen. That’s absolutely a form of online story telling, but it’s not interactive in any way, shape or form."

"Collaboration is maybe THE key ingredient to what makes a powerful interactive. One of the great things about our newsroom is that it is unusually collaborative, and most of the projects you’ll see involve multiple desks."


And I also want to highlight another thing: Pilhofer says that all the software they use is opensource. While there's still fear to use opensource software on many newspapers, at least in Spain (I still don't know any using Open Office, using a very simple example), the biggest one uses it. A good lesson for the managers.

Mantras (II)

Michel Gaffré, former design director at Le Monde and now media consultant, wrote an article in 1998 on the magazine Latina about the labour of the infographic journalist (Gafré, Michel (1998): El rol de la infografía en el rediseño. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 6.). These are somes of the most important sentences of the article translated (at least, my favourites):

Which is the ideal profile for our visual journalist? The most important, by far, is the ability of thinking on a journalistic way.

Is essential that the newsroomcould accept the infographics journalist by what he is. He must be able to participate on the daily editorial meetings, to know the topics of the day and the topics that are being prepared for the future, accept works and propose ideas.

And one by Jeff Goertzen, at the moment graphics director at the Denver Post, quoted on the article:

The newspaper whose newsroom knows what a graphic is and could be able to think on them will publish good infographics.

Mantras

Some sentences by Steve Duenes, graphics director at The New York Times, that I always try to have in my mind when I work.

"When we create diagrams, we keep a couple of things in mind. We want to be clear, and we don't want to invent anything."

"It doesn't do us much good to produce a few splashy graphics but stumble on the smaller, routine things.

"We don't really think of ourselves as a print graphics department. We think of ourselves as a desk that can produce graphics for whichever platform makes sense."