We regularly produce interactive infographics for clients as part of our infographic design service, but when we get a spare minute we like to produce our own interactive pieces – both as an exercise in brand promotion and to help demonstrate to prospective clients exactly what we can do.

Below you’ll find our ever-expanding collection of interactive infographics, simply click one to be taken to the corresponding graphic. If you’re interested in commissioning an interactive graphic for your brand, give us a call on 01432 373 673 or drop us an email via the contact form.

Designbysoap Ltd In-House Projects

Client Projects

So to show our readers, clients and potential staff members where our content is created, we’ve produced the following infographic look at the Designbysoap office:

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Do you fancy joining our team? Give us a call on 01432 373 670 to discuss potential vacancies, or drop us an email using our contact form and tell us why we should hire you. Don’t be modest, if you’re a talented content developer feel free to big yourself up!

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To celebrate the recent release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, we decided to produce this Star Trek interactive infographic, showing every film release since 1979′s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Find out how much each film cost to make and how much it grossed worldwide, or click on the film title to find out more about the film itself.

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Want an interactive infographic, static infographic or motion graphic for your brand? Head over to our infographic design page for more information on commissioning a project, or give us a call on 01432 373 670.

the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.

So let’s have a look at some excellent examples of companies who have done newsjacking well:

1. Mini

This is one of my favourite examples of newsjacking in the last year or so, and demonstrates perfectly how to take a news story, inject some humour and link it to a brand ethos. The ad is referring to the discovery of horsemeat in beef products in the UK and Europe, found via DNA testing. The story initially broke in Ireland and spread quickly across the European Union, resulting in huge numbers of beef products being removed from supermarkets and shops. Taking advantage of the story, which was huge news all across Europe, Mini produced this ad with the tagline ‘Beef. With a lot of horses hidden in it.’

2. Sir Alex Ferguson Retirement

A lot of companies jumped on the news of Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson retiring, with varying results. Some of the ads, Tweets and pieces of content were pretty poor, but a couple of them were excellent and earned the brands a lot of social media traction and increased traffic. I couldn’t pick between two examples, as I think they’re both excellent, so I’ve included both.

The first was an ad (used both online and in print) from Paddy Power, who are generally very good at jumping on the news and using it to their advantage. Their ad reads ‘Some Scouser has one wish left…’ and then has a wish list of Maggie (crossed off), Fergie (crossed off) and Liverpool to win the league, which cleverly has odds next to it of 25-1 (considering they’re a betting company, it’s a direct advertisement of a specific bet, as well as general brand advertising). The second is a Tweet from Nando’s, which reads ‘in honour of Sir Alex Ferguson’s announcement that he is retiring we’re proud to introduce ‘Nando’s Fergie Time’ – all our Manchester Nando’s will be open 5 minutes later tonight’. A funny reference that any football fan will get, and a great way to advertise their brand in a way that was sure to (and did) increase social media traction.

3. Etihad Airways

Etihad Airways are the main sponsor of Manchester City Football Club, so when Manchester United won the league last month and City got beaten by Wigan in the FA Cup final, you would imagine they didn’t have a whole lot to shout about. That context made it even more impressive when they demonstrated a superb level of wit and opportunism last month – upon spotting a photo taken in Manchester of United players in a City-sponsored, sky blue taxi (while on a night out celebrating their title win), Etihad quickly incorporated the picture into an ad in the Manchester Evening News. The ad showed the picture, with a tagline reading ‘Congratulations Manchester United. You deserve to go home in style.’

4. Kit Kat

Another football-related piece of newjacking, this one focusing on Michael Owen’s retirement from the game back in March. The ad features a pair of boots hung up on the number 10 hook (Owen’s England number), and has the famous Kit Kat slogan and logo. The image was featured on Facebook, alongside the status ’40 England goals, 89 caps and one devastating hat-trick against Germany. Michael, have a well earned break’. The status was Liked over 250 times in one day, and shared all over the social media platform in the following days.

5. The Guardian

This ad was featured in The Guardian newspaper, and was published in the weeks after the death of Margaret Thatcher to promote an upcoming feature on the former Prime Minister’s life. Using someone’s death to promote a brand or product is a very tricky and often ill-advised practice, but in this instance the ad is tastefully done and isn’t attempting to profit on the misfortune of others – instead using a significant cultural and historical event to promote an unbiased piece of journalism.

The ad features a jar of Marmite, labelled ‘Margaret’ and featuring an image of Thatcher’s face along with the line ‘Contains Iron’. This is an excellent play on the tagline of Marmite (‘you either love it or hate it’) and the juxtaposition of Thatcher’s reputation and popularity in the UK, which divides opinion to this day. The ‘Contains Iron’ is also a clever reference to Maggie’s nickname as subsequent characterisation as ‘The Iron Lady’. Along with the image is the tagline ‘One woman, a nation divided’ along with some information on the article the ad is promoting.

6. Oreo

This brilliant Tweet was sent out during Super Bowl XLVII, when the lights in the stadium went out for half an hour, causing the game to be stopped until they were fixed. Given the worldwide popularity of the Super Bowl and the millions of TV viewers, jumping on this event was an excellent idea and although many, many brands attempted it, the Oreo Tweet was by far the best and resulted in more than 12,000 ReTweets before the game even restarted.

The Tweet read ‘Power out? No problem’ and featured an image of an Oreo cookie in a dark space, with the tagline ‘You can still dunk in the dark’.

7. Eurostar

This one was spotted in a magazine by Grant Hunter from Urgent Genius, who included it on his blog. It’s a great example of opportunistic advertising and was published around Beckham’s announcement that he would be joining PSG from Real Madrid.

The ad featured a new-born baby with a hospital wrist-tag, revealing the baby’s name to be Paris. The tag line reads ‘It is the City of Love after all David’ and then the Eurostar logo (who of course do regular trips to Paris from the UK). It’s a clever reference to the Beckham’s highly publicised naming of their son Brooklyn, who was conceived in New York City. It’s a great example of being on the ball (no pun intended) and releasing a clever, sophisticated promotional advert that uses the news superbly to make the reader laugh and increase brand recognition:

Have you got a good example of newsjacking you’d like to share with us? Let us know in the comments below! If you can find some good examples of how not to take advantage of current news stories, let us know and we’ll include it in our upcoming post with a credit link to you for sending it to us (if we haven’t spotted it already that is).

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So to give you your fix of infographic inspiration, here are my favourite infographic sites to look at every day:

1. Guardian Datablog

We’re big fans of the Guardian in general, and their datablog is a great example of how data visualisation can be incorporated into a serious news portal and enhance the message. Their infographics are simple, clear and beautifully put together and I regularly check in on the site just to see what’s new, as well as catching up on the events of the day.

2. Visual.ly

One of the most popular and well known infographic sites, Visual.ly not only produce their own infographics (and features a marketplace for you to find a designer for your own projects), but they publish scores of infographics from brands and designers all over the world each and every day, making it an ideal place to find inspiration or just to have a browse. They also made Designbysoap a Certified Designer, so we know they’ve got good taste!

3. Information is Beautiful

Probably the most famous infographic design brand in existence (at least amongst infographic fanatics anyway), the Information Is Beautiful site is the official blog of David McCandless – an independent data journalist, information designer and author of the world famous Information Is Beautiful book. Beautiful visualisations, great data and some very, very interesting posts.

4. Visual Loop

Visual Loop is a constant steam of links to inforgraphics, charts, maps and other visualisations that the authors feel makes the process of understanding data clearer or simpler. They currently have just under 35,000 posts making it a wealth of inspiration and entertainment, and it’s one of my regular go-to infographic sites.

5. Good.is Infographics

This is one of my favourite infographic sites, as they regular post not only beautifully design graphics and data visualisations, but come up with some fascinating concepts and data sets. I’m not too fond of the ‘click to launch’ format they use to view the infographics (purely a personal preference), but I can forgive that when the visualisations are of such a high quality.

6. Mashable Infographics

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the Mashable website, and their infographic section has grown in popularity substantially over the last couple of years. Well worth checking out for some particularly entertaining infographics – they’ve also featured quite a few of our client infographics, so we’ll always have a soft spot for the Mashable site.

7. Cool Infographics

Run by Randy Krum, who’s something of an infographics expert in his own right, the Cool Infographics site features daily infographics and visualisations and also includes a nice review of the featured piece each day. They also publish guest blogs from infographic specialists – in fact you can see my recent post on the site here.

8. Flowing Data

FlowingData is an extremely high quality data visualisation blog that regularly featured top-notch content from some of the best infographic designers in the world. Run by Nathan Yau, the site is regularly updated and is highly recommended for data-savvy readers and those interested in effective data visualisations.

Can you think of a top infographic design blog that we haven’t featured? Let us know in the comments below!

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We like to help our clients get to know the team and the environment in which their work is produced (in fact later this month we’ll be publishing an infographic look at the Designbysoap office), so we thought these photos would make a worthy blog post. So enjoy the pictures, and feel free to give them a share using the social media buttons to the left!

Main Office and Meeting Room

Break Room

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One of our senior infographic designers came up with the idea of sharing this process with our readers and our customers via a blog post, so here’s the first of our on-site client retrospectives, and for the first edition we’ll be looking at an interactive infographic we produced for Citalia, based around the Giro D’Italia.

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

With the majority of our content creation clients we will work in one of two ways; either the client comes to us with a specific idea of what they’d like to see, or we produce a series of concept ideas for the client to approve. In this case it was the former – Citalia already had a clear idea for the content, they wanted an interactive map of the Giro D’Italia course, with a list of hotels and restaurants at each location for those visiting Italy for the race. The hotels would then link back to the relevant hotel page on the Citalia website, allowing users to read more about it, or even book a room if they were heading to that specific location.

Luckily, Citalia had also collected all the data for us, meaning we could head straight to the initial design stage.

DESIGN SKETCH

To allow the client to see the general design outline before we dove straight into the mock-up, we produced a sketch of how we envisioned the final piece to look:

This rough outline not only ensures that the client knows where the design is headed, but can save us significant time in the long run if we know how the final piece should look before we start on the illustration and layout.

The sketch was signed-off immediately, which is always nice, allowing us to move on to producing the coloured, vector-based mock-ups.

DESIGN MOCK-UP AND INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS

Before we move to the project to the coders, we need to get sign off on the visual aesthetic, including colours, design style and iconography where appropriate. In addition, we also show the client some of the interactive elements of the piece using static jpegs, as this allows us to ensure a minimal amount of revisions once the project has been coded. This not only saves us a lot of effort, but saves the client money, as it’s far quicker for us to revise a static graphic (compared to revising the graphic and re-coding).

The designs were signed off with just a handful of revisions, as well as some clarifications on how the interactive rollovers would work, which weren’t featured in the static mock-ups. Once these were sent over and revisions completed, the project was moved on to the coding stage.

CODING

There are a few different ways we can code a project, depending on the purpose of the content, whether or not responsiveness is required, what kind of functionality is required, etc. etc.

For the Giro D’Italia interactive piece it was important to the client that the copy was fully indexable for SEO purposes, so we elected to use standard HTML/CSS with jQuery, with the copy written directly into the HTML file. The client was happy with the final piece, allowing us to send over the files for their development team to place on site.

So that’s it for the Citalia client retrospective, to view the final interactive piece click the image below:

View the final interactive piece

Want us to produce an interactive infographic for your brand or website? Give us a call on 01432 373 670 to discuss your project and get a tailored quote.

But it would seem not only are the White House not finished with infographics, but they’re planning on producing quite a few more, according to the first post on their new Tumblr page, which includes the following infographic:

As you can see from the modified coxcomb chart above, infographics are clearly one of the formats to be getting more attention in upcoming posts from the White House team. In fact, in their post they more or less say as much:

We see some great things here at the White House every day, and sharing that stuff with you is one of the best parts of our jobs. That’s why we’re launching a Tumblr … We’ve got some wonky charts, too. Because to us, those are actually kind of exciting.

They certainly weren’t just being colourful with the term ‘wonky charts’, which is a bit of a shame as it would be nice to see some genuine data visualisation, but I have to admit the graphic above does have something of a charm about it.

Either way, we’re excited to see what’s next for the White House infographics, and glad to see the format getting such high profile attention.

This week we’re starting a brand new series, which we’re calling the ‘Tech Myths Series’; a collection of posts and infographic debunking some of the most pervasive myths around modern technology we can find. For the first post in the series we’re looking at cars, covering three myths that we hear on a regular basis…

1. 55 miles per hour is the most economic speed at which to drive your car. 

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Our first car graphic focuses on economical driving, and the myth that 55mph (or 89 kilometres per hour) is the most economical speed at which to drive. This simply isn’t true, and we suspect it’s something that is designed to slow people down from 70mph in order to make the roads safer.

Car engines in general are far more efficient not at a certain speed, but a certain number of revs. The most efficient number is around 2,000 revs per minute, which equates to between 35-45mph in the majority of cars.

2. You should let your engine run on cold winter mornings before driving

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This one is a common activity in the UK (mainly because we have so many cold mornings!). The myth is that you should start the engine and leave the car running for a little while before embarking on your journey, in order to warm up all the components and improve the performance of the car.

We’ve no idea where this one came from, but it’s simply not true. Just check your vehicle handbook, and you’ll see that manufacturers state the the best way to warm up your car is to drive it, as this gets all the components up to their ideal operating temperature much quicker. Idling the engine is not only ineffective in warming your engine to its optimum temperature, but it wastes fuel and increases overall emissions.

3. Electric cars are 100% green

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I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with Prius drivers who claim (in one case rather forcibly) that electric cars are 100% green because they don’t have an internal combustion engine, meaning they don’t emit greenhouse gases or contribute to air pollution.

Whilst it’s true that their direct emissions are minimal, the myth that they’re completely ‘green’ is simply unfounded. They the same tyres as petrol cars, which shed rubber onto the roads and contribute to waterway pollution, and the batteries they use contain lead, lithium and nickel, amongst other rare and toxic materials. But perhaps the most notable statistic is that the manufacture of an electric car creates 8.8 tons of CO2, compared to 5.6 tons for your average petrol car. Combine this with the fact that their batteries wear out quicker than traditional car batteries, meaning they have a shorter lifespan and need to be replaced more frequently (creating yet more pollution), and it’s easy to see how they’re nowhere near being 100% green.

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So that’s it for the first instalment of our tech myths series, next week we’ll be looking at batteries and kicking off our ‘How Stuff Works’ infographic series.

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