Robert Kosara on The Visualization Cargo Cult

Infographics are popping up everywhere these days, and more and more I see companies that have nothing to do with Infographics or Visualization publishing them as a way to attract traffic and attention.  The bright colors and pretty visuals are eye-catching, but typically present little to no information in a useful form.  Robert Kosara takes issue with these vague charts that ‘dilute the field’ of visualization in a new blog post.

Visualization has become the tool to create pretty (or at least colorful) visuals that attract attention. There’s about as much visualization in these images as in an actor depicting a scientist in a tv commercial.

The picture above comes from his post, which comes from the Ford Fusion visualization ‘contest’, which I think really is a contender for Most Useless Visualization of All Time.

via The Visualization Cargo Cult | EagerEyes.org.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.