A few weeks ago, the Guardian's datablog published an article on the backlash that seems to be gathering against infographics.  Although they describe it as "gathering steam", some of the sentiments they describe aren't new: it's just a pretty picture but it doesn't actually tell you anything; the design choices obscure the actual data; is this going to be the pie chart that looks like Pac Man again?  In fact, here's a critique of infographics which is nearly two years old.

The main point of the Guardian's article is that tools that have developed in recent years allow people with all sorts of expertise and specialisms to create infographics (rather than just those who know about data, or about design).  Sometimes, this means that the folks putting those infographics together don't follow some of the rules that you'll hear about often at Thunderfly; and sometimes an infographic is used in the same way as stock photography - simply a colourful illustration to break up the text, rather than communicating a message on its own terms.

Now, I know that infographics are just one branch of visualising data, and I'm not averse to a bit of colour.  But I found myself in sympathy with the critics when I encountered this infographic, created for the political social media aggregator, Yatterbox.

Here are the issues as I see it.  First of all, though, you'll need to take off those sunglasses.  No, I don't know why the designer has chosen a tartan background, unless he particularly wanted to bring out the way it clashes horribly with the Union Jack header.  So, first issue: the designer wants to pack in all sorts of information, using a number of different techniques, but the background image draws immediate attention to itself at the expense of communicating their insight.

The stacked bar chart of social media usage isn't too bad; the colours used are related to the service in question (turquoise for Twitter, dark blue for Facebook, poor old Flickr gets white) so the design draws upon our pre-existing brand knowledge as a design shortcut.  But adding white space between the bars makes it tricky to draw comparisons, and the rounded corners also change the shape, and therefore the accuracy, of the sections.  I'm not convinced that the orange bar for RSS feeds looks more than twice the size of the blue Facebook bar.

The bar chart on 'When they joined Twitter' has left me questioning the scale.  Is that a percentage of the people they follow? Raw numbers? I can see that early 2009 was a popular time to get a Twitter account, but how easy is it to compare the second half of 2009 with the first half of 2010?

I'm not sure how relevant - or indeed reliable - the infographics are that are generated from Klout data.  Listing the Twitter handles of the 'most influential' or 'most influenced' means that I don't know whether they're real people or just bots that retweet from elsewhere.  And finally, although the last few snippets are interesting, they're not really 'Trends to Watch'.

What do you think? Are infographics just treated like pictures? What are the positives of the example I've picked out? And does it matter whether infographics are accurate?