Have you ever wondered how some infographics seem to show up across the blogosphere all at once? It’s because the PR people who make these things actively promote them to bloggers.
I fully concur with Tom Morris’s excellent post on the matter, Infographics are porn without the happy ending. I’ll just steal the good bit, explaining why these things are actually seriously problematic, and why you’d have to be a bit of a cock to send one to anyone to do with an organisation like Wikimedia:
If you make an infographic, you are basically saying fuck you to blind people, fuck you to the Googlebot and often fuck you to people with colour-blindness. And you are definitely saying fuck you to people on slow connections. If you are paying £4 a megabyte to get data in Paris (yeah, I hate you too, Orange), putting an infographic where text could do the job isn’t just a giant fuck you but a waste of actual money. And by the time you notice, you can’t complain. If you are out in India and your only connection to the WWW is a phone we Westerners called shitty and threw away about three years ago, the infographic is completely inaccessible to you.
If I run a graphic here, it’ll be either because it’s pure decoration, because I think it’s important to getting the point across or because the image is the point. It will not be because five lines of text is best expressed in 200 obfuscated kilobytes.