Guide to Finding Visual Communication and Infographics: Social Media Art and Community Creativity

(image credit: Jesse Thomas and Brian Solis)

I’m really facinated by the rise of visual communication and infographics to explain our world. Hopefully as we learn to communicate more visually, it will transform our human relations in a positive way.

The following is an exercise in free form blogging (which develops in ebbs and flows) which provides about two dozen resources for design inspiration to create compelling visual stories or perhaps some infographic link bait.

Just thought these were cool! Enjoy!!!!!

Phase One: Confessions of Guy Kawasaki Fanboy : Alltop Design and Oddities. Those in the design field find inspiration Ffffound and some may even find odd inspiration at oddities.alltop or perhaps deviant art. Of course design.alltop.com. and popculture.alltop.com can also help inspire the uninspired.

Phase Two: Fun Interfaces for Inspiration Oh…and check out this Death Cab for Cutie video by Ross Ching by that I found with one of Vimeos tools err toys called pulse. As the web goes more social and visual search engines proliferate…such will be the ways of the web. (for now Diagram Diaries on Flickr is pretty sweet)

Phase Three: Community Creativity Vlog Your Face I haven’t looked at a lot of the faces….but at a minimum it seems like a cool concept. This is more a metaphor for how data organization or aggregation or taggging (perhaps even with a ranking component could work). Digg has several toys which are worth investigating in this regard.

Phase Four: Fantastic Photos and Your Finger Tips There’s a great guide to adding ffree images and photography to your posts from We Build Pages. Of course istockphoto, the stock exchange, and dreamstime all provide fantastic for pay options for an extremely low price point.

Phase Five: Do it Yourself visual communication and info graphics. The web and social media is all about DIY. Whether its making authentic presentations like Beth Kanter, creating “Back of the Napkin” stick figures like Dan Roam, or making diagrams like of David Armano author of Logic and Emotion. You might even try what Common Craft or what Blend Tec did Will it Blend.

Phase Six: Mind mapping Your Way to Greatness (Or How to Win Friends and Influence People…Online) If that doesn’t work, we all know mindmaps whether freeform or created like a flowchart are the new black. You can even post your mindmap on Mind meister.

Phase Six: Crowd sourcing Your Creative You could also crowd source to find your design at Crowdspring or 99 Designs if you want to invest (or go with a more mainstream link baiter who focuses on visual posts).

Phase Seven: Eye Candy from the Creative Commons You could play around with Flickr toys and tools…or check out the flickr stream on PopURLs. Thomas Hawk is one of the more popular photographers on flickr. You can also re-verse engineer some of the best flickr photographers by checking out Stumbleupon, Digg, and delicious.

Phase Eight: I Can Has Funny Of course its hard to go wrong with Lolcats at ICanHasCheeseburger or the funny punditry at Graph jam. (See also: This is Indexed or the educational infographics at Good Sheets produced by Good Magazine)

Phase Nine: Aggregators of Visual Communication A great example is 27 Visualizations and infographics to understand the financial crisis, of which the most famous is probably the credit crisis visualized. Visual Edu is quite interesting, but Info Viz is far more useful and is a fantastic repository of visual communication.

Bonus: And for mac geeky good measure…heres how to hackintosh a Dell into a Macintosh.