Web Panacea: April 2013

Infographics are popular. They help reduce complex coherences to simplified illustrations. Information gets visualized. The best infographics are self-explanatory, needing almost no text at all. A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. And it’s true. In this collection, we share with you 40 entertaining infographics on popular topics from around the net. If you are a programmer, illustrator, designer or nerd of any other type, you’ll most likely find at least the majority of these informative pieces interesting. If you don’t like the content, probably you’ll be inspired by the way, the graphic has been done.

Photo Credits: Lauren Manning via photopin cc

If you are keen on creating your own infographic, we have something for you: Look for our mini-tutorials on photoshopping your information throughout the following article.

Designing The “World Of Programming” Infographic

Website: smashingmagazine.com
Topic: History of programming languages

Logos: A Look at the Meaning in Colors [Infographic]

Website: dailyinfographic.com
Topic: Impact of colors

Quick Tips for Obtaining a Trademark

Website: dailyinfographic.com
Topic: Protecting your brand

The History of the iPhone

Website: mashable.com
Topic: History of the iPhone

Drawing Percentage Visualizations

01 First Bar
Recent infographic do not impress with hard facts, at least not foremost. They do impress through their way of presenting these facts. To help you start with your own visualizations, I have put together a few mini-tutorials using my favorite platform, Adobe Photoshop. With a good ability of abstraction you should be able to port my tipps to your own favorite graphics app, too.
To show percentages in the form of some bars, we might choose to use a light 3D appearance . We pick the Rectangle Tool and draw a short bar in the color of our choice.
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02 Second Bar
Ctrl+J duplicates the bar. With the help of the Move Tool we position the second instance of our bar slightly down and to the right. BBoth bars should overlap a little. Performing a double-click on the thumbnail of the layer in the layers window, we open the color picker to choose a slightly lighter tone of the same color. Pick up the Direct Selection Tool, target the right edges and pull them over to the right.
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03 Designing The Transition
With another Ctrl+J we duplicate the bar again. This time, still using the Direct Selection Tool we position the upper right edge of this bar on the upper right edge of our first bar. The lower right edge is handled in the same way. Now we darken the new bar to give it a darker appearance than the other two bars show. Change the layer order, so that the smaller, darker bar is in between the two bigger bars.
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04 Reproduction And Labeling
Now we can easily duplicate the three pieces, position them elsewhere and color them differently as often as we need percentage bars to be shown. If you need shorter and/or longer bars you can always take to the Direct Selection Tool and pull the edges. Label the bars simply by putting in text at appropriate positions.
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The Evolution of the Geek

Website: visual.ly
Topic: Evolution of the – well – Geek

Sitting All Day is Killing You

Website: coolinfographics.com
Topic: Stand up to not get killed by your own chair

Salmon: Wild vs. Farm

Website: dailyinfographic.com
Topic: Benefits of natural environments for animals

SEO In Pictures – Our SEO Infographic

Website: datadial.net
Topic: SEO, obviously…

The Digital Dump

Website: visual.ly
Topic: Electronic waste

Illustrations

01 Knocking Out Illustrations
To quickly enhance an infographic, read-made illustrations by stock agencies are a valid choice. Mostly these come as vector graphics, which guarantees for unlimited scalability. Image we’d want to play around the topic “Pets in Households by Species” we would, besides other things, need some illustrations of the pets involved. I found this one: Origami animals logo templates | #89604826 | sellingpix from Shutterstock.com.
While the graphic does not come with a transparent background, we double-click the image to create a Layer 0. Now we choose Add Layer Mask from the bottom of the layers window. Now, with the help of the Pencil Tool and black as the foreground color we knock out the illustration roughly, then finer with the Polygonal Lasso Tool.
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02 Add Illustrations
If you’ve put the illustrations on separate layers, we can easily combine them with the above created percentage bars. Having worked with shapes we can as easily adjust colors. We have successfully enhanced this part of the infographic, but we want more…
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So You Want to Watch YouTube Flowchart

Website: karenkavett.blogspot.de
Topic: What is watched on YouTube?

Mobile Mania – The Growing Importance of Mobile Website Optimization

Website: blog.kissmetrics.com
Topic: Mobile clients need mobile websites

Beautiful-HTML

Website: css-tricks.com
Topic: Awe, look. A beautiful HTML code…

Facebook vs. Twitter Social Demographics

Website: coolinfographics.com
Topic: Whose one is longer?

What Makes Someone Leave A Website?

Website: blog.kissmetrics.com
Topic: Why visitors leave you early

CSS Infographic – Interesting Facts and History

Website: blog.templatemonster.com
Topic: CSS Facts

The Evolution of the Web

Website: evolutionofweb.appspot.com
Topic: Title says it all

How To Get A Job In Social Media In 5 Minutes

Website: dailyinfographic.com
Topic: How easy it is to get a job in social media

What do I.T. Specialists do?

Website: dailyinfographic.com
Topic: Ever wondered, what IT people really do?

The Infographic Noob Guide to Online Marketing

Website: coolinfographics.com
Topic: Online Marketing

Online Testing Essentials

Website: blog.kissmetrics.com
Topic: Online Testing

The Anatomy of an Effective Web Design

Website: webdesignledger.com
Topic: Effective Webdesign

The Internet, a Decade Later

Website: dailyinfographic.com
Topic: The future is upon us

The Anatomy Of A Perfect Landing Page

Website: formstack.com
Topic: Is there such a thing as a perfect landing page?
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For the Love of Facebook

Website: dailyinfographic.com
Topic: How Facebook changes relationships

Awesome Idea For A Website

Website: vitamintalent.com
Topic: Exactly,… Awesome.

35 Years of Apple Products – Visual History

Website: coolinfographics.com
Topic: Apple’s history

One Icon For Male, One For Female

01 Head And Legs
Define a foreground color and draw a shape using the Ellipse Tool while keeping the Shift key pressed. This way your ellipse will become a perfect circle. Legs are created using the Rounded Rectangle Tool. In the options bar define a radius of 20 pixels.
To draw the female icon you can copy the shapes of the male icon (biblical, isn’t it), position them with the use of the Move Tool and then adjust the colors by double-clicking the layer thumb. The skirt got drawn with the Pencil Tool, with shape selected in the options bar.
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02 Bodies
Create the body of the male icon with the Rectangle Tool. Draw the shoulders using the Rounded Rectangle Tool. To make sure, they are only shown in half, you pick the Rectangle Tool and select Subtract from shape area in the options bar. Now we can selectively set areas of the shape to transparent, simply by drawing another form on top of them. Arms and legs are crafted using the Rounded Rectangle Tool.
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03 Percentage Values
Position the arms of the woman icon using Edit > Transform Path > Rotate. Draw the bars for the percentage values using the Rectangle Tool and inscribe the values with the Text Tool. I’d suggest white for the values.
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30 April, 2013

Drawing Percentage Visualizations

Illustrations

One Icon For Male, One For Female