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Visually, the online infographics company that just closed Series A financing round of $8.1 million [See more at: https://vizworld.com/2014/01/visual-ly-announces-closing-series-a-financing-round-of-8-1-million] has at its foundation a different business and community model than Behance or Deviant Art, both well known web communities for designers. Visually’s community focuses on a more narrow function of design: the creation of  infographics in all forms.

While there are currently over 100,000 members on the site, it’s a well-organized collaborative marketplace that doesn’t use a bidding system for client projects, nor functions like a traditional graphic design agency when it comes to the business of producing infographics for their clients.

In an interview this week with co-founder Lee Sherman, I learned about the collaborative business proposition that favors the creative directors and designer members of Visually,  as well as how Visually has been able to scale this model and still produce  consistently high-quality infographics that range from long, static vertical pieces to completely interactive models in multiple languages.

Lee said, “You can’t just hire any designer [to create infographics]. Designers need to have an understanding of data. They need to know how to tell a story, they need to be able to find the insights in the data. Most … are done by interdisciplinary teams, so they’re not just made by designer, they’re made by designers working with data journalists, working with researchers… It could be an interactive piece, which requires a developer.

These things are complicated: to do them well is not easy. Really, the hard part is this collaboration piece. How do you find all of the resources, how do you put them together in a way that’s going to produce a really great infographic?”

After going “fairly down the road” of building a data integration technology platform, Visually switched its development focus to creating a collaboration engine to respond to the growing membership of designers and other potential team members, as the demand for infographics grew. This was the secret to scale: qualifying the abilities of members, then being able to provide them an online space for collaboration, to facilitate fast and open communication for project members regardless of their location, and making the collaboration platform cater to the needs of an infographic development/design team.

In a web-based platform, it makes scaling at the international level simple. While Visually is based out of San Francisco and maintains a small office in New York, additional brick-and-mortar offices are being planned.

In closing, Lee mentioned that they are looking for people with skills other than design ability to become highly valuable team members on many projects, particularly as Visually continues to grow:

“We could always use more developers..people who are equipped to do interactive pieces for us… and really good data analysts. There really isn’t a marketplace out there for data analysts…they don’t really think of this kind of model as a way they might work, but i think we could bring a lot of work to really good data analysts out there… So, if you’re out there, get in touch!”

 

 

 

 

 

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