ISO50

I went straight to ebay italia and bought the only issue that was on offer there ;-) sorry guys!

By the way this magazine looks like it makes great use of infographics — I can’t read italian, but they are visually interesting and would lead me to read the text if I were able. It’s like “come for the pretty graphics, stay for the text.”

I love this work from Francesco and his team at IL. I got my hands on the first two issues and it’s beautiful stuff.

Infograhics have been popularized but a lot of what I see is without much substance. Some of the worst I’ve seen are the Good Magazine ‘Transparencies’. They are build around illustritive ‘chart junk’ (see Edward Tufte) that only makes them more confusing and sometimes misrepresentative of the info. It’s good to see such solid work in IL.

From a freelancer point of view I know how much information is crammed into a typical infographics project. Considering the amount of information they’re obviously working with, I think they’ve done a terrific job at creating very well thought out dimensional work.

I don’t think these particular examples are overdone at all.

I had thought the typeface was the same as Vancouver’s “Stay Local” maps http://staylocalmaps.blogspot.com/ which myfonts told me was Caslon. Can anyone point up the difference between Publico and Caslon for me?

I think the trend can be ridiculous, but at the same time, every now and then, something really inspiring shows up. And I think all the infographics-mania comes from designers being really inspired by the good stuff.

In the same way that the design trends follow technology (as noted by a previous commenter), I think think they also respond to a need to make sense of currently prevalent information. Infographics, to me, seem to be an attempt to give more form and meaning to our current state of information overload. Unfortunately, the numberporn itself becomes an excess of statistics and whatnot, and at the end of the day we have to ask, no matter how beautiful, why should I care whether Blogger Jones ate 19 Big Macs in 2009? My guess is that we don’t care about what the numbers are saying so much as how they’re being said.

T

I dunno. All the charts look incredible from a design perspective but I feel like having an anxiety attack looking at them.

Agreed. Infographics have evolved from a legitimate attempt to make complex data interpretable into an excuse for producing beautiful but equally complex graphics. If the reader is wowed but not actually helped, the designer has failed.

Info-graphics for the sake of info-graphics are annoying to me. When they are created for a purpose, they can be very inspiring. Either way, I respect designers who are able to arrange a massive amount of information and create a visually-stimulating representation. I’m well aware of the time and effort involved, so I can definitely appreciate them.

You forgot to even mention Luca Pitoni, the Creative Director of the Magazine. Franchi’s doing a great work as an Art Director but not mentioning Pitoni seems a bit unfair to me.

No, I’m not Pitoni, although my first name is the same. =)

I don’t think so. They probably designed some infographics but not all of them, as the magazine usually hires freelances (graphic designers/illustrators) for this kind of work.
If you check Franchi’s Flickr you’ll see the credits for each infographic he publishes there.

Do you know what are the dimensions of IL?

Sweet, a magazine of infographics.

/killself

grazie mille per questo omaggio, devo dire che comunque queste infografiche sono nate dando uno sguardo a Wired (rivista tra l’altro fondata da uno statunitense di origine italiana).

Devo dire che oggi giorno è difficile creare qualcosa di davvero originale… comunque “IL” è un ottimo settimanale devo dire.

ciao a tutti