Design, Science and Technology

Visage makes infographics easy, and they customize palettes for free.

If you’re an art director at a media outlet, odds are you have to assign and commission each data visualization you publish. That gets time-consuming, even when the graphic in question is nothing but a small pie chart running alongside a feature story.

Visage, a newly launched platform, provides custom templates for graphics. There are myriad tools on the market that do this (for a gander at 30 of them, check out this list), but Visage is the latest, and it's gaining traction with designers at Mashable, MSNBC, and A&E...

Data is everywhere and well-designed data graphics can be both beautiful and meaningful. As visualizations take center stage in a data-centric world, researchers and developers spend much time understanding and creating better visualizations. But they spend just as much time understanding how tools can help programmers and designers create visualizations faster, more effectively, and more enjoyably.

As any visualization practitioner will tell you, turning a dataset from raw stuff in a file to a final result in a picture is far from a single-track, linear path. Rather, there is a constant iteration of competing designs, tweaking and evaluating at once their pros and cons. The visualization research community has recognized the importance of keeping track of this process.

Read the complete article to learn more about the future of the practice and the tools that enable designers to create thoughtful infographics and visualizations...