Infographics have always drove me nuts. Aside from being visually attractive, they are worthless. They offer no value, except just being eye candy.
The more I spend more time working with concepts like the Single Page Application (SPA) and Hacker Storytelling, the more I desire a more meaningful replacement for the current infographic.
I would like to start seeing more data driven, visually appealing infographics that are done with the same class as an SPA. Each section of an infographic would be a JavaScript widget that is connected to a JSON data source or a live JSON API.
The entire infographic could potentially be interactive, allowing people to play with the data, turn knobs and dials and get a feel for the data behind the visual. Additionally, savvy users could also access and download or fork the data behind each inographic.
Each interactive info raphic SPA could be hosted on Github pages, and provide a image capture or generate PDF feature so you could capture your classic image of an infographic, then share and syndicate as your heart desires.
The infographic SPA could also be embeddable so you could place a smaller version on other sites, with the ability to expand and see the full version, really bringing home the concept of syndication.
I just can't help but think the current definition of an infographic is a severe failure of the imagination. While some can be nice looking, they lack the depth that is possible within the current data rich, API driven and sexy HTML5 world we currently live in.
