idsgn has a nice writeup on the rising popularity of infographics, and talks to Deroy Peraza, one of the principals of Hyperakt, about what’s happened in the field recently and where he thinks it is going.

Now, after working on several infographics projects, I’m beginning to see just how much the information is shaped by the designer. The countless ways information can be represented visually allow for a great flexibility in the overall message you can send the reader. A change in scale or proportion can make the same data look extremely dramatic or very minimal. This slightly worried me as I had come to trust data visualizations as a valuable source of information. After all, I am seeing the raw data with my own eyes. Plus, these visualizations are coming to me from trusted sources like GOOD magazine and others. Could they be misleading me?

They touch briefly on issues like accuracy in visualization and intentionally misleading the viewer, but sadly move on pretty quickly to more business-related questions.

via The good and evil of infographics: idsgn (a design blog).