Visual.ly opens it's doors for infographic creation.

Visual.ly opens it's doors for infographic creation.(create.visual.ly)

39 points by paulofisch 14 years ago | 15 comments

It's fairly unclear to me how this works. Clicking on the "Use Theme" buttons doesn't do anything. The "Working" and "History" buttons in the left panel don't do anything. You can't scroll the sidebar at all, so content is just cut off. So far, it seems like a complete non-starter. I have no idea what the hell this site does, anyways. It's just templates for so-called "infographics"?

Worse, the screen is completely filled with "social" buttons. They're in the header, they're in the sidebar, and they're in the footer. Furthermore, the "Follow us on Twitter" button is pre-checked so that if you try to log in via Twitter, you automatically get subscribed to their account. That's a douchey move.

Seems to me that the purpose of the site is to spam you with crap. The site seems so skeezy that I daren't "log in to Twitter" through their site.

gordonguthrie 14 years ago | |

I know what it does, and I want to try and use it, but I found it was incomprehensible.

suking 14 years ago | |

I second all this. How a company like this raises VC is just dumbfounding. Why the F do graphic designers need to raise VC to pump out more infographics. Isn't that fad over with anyways?

maukdaddy 14 years ago | | |

Just another sign that there's a huge VC bubble forming in the Valley.

Yes, there are plenty of legitimate companies that will generate substantial value for VCs, but when you see money being thrown at companies who exist to make infographics it smells of trouble.

dmix 14 years ago |

After SEOers/blog spammers discovered infographics a couple yrs ago I've really grown tired of seeing so many low quality ones around the internet.

They usually take a bit of effort to understand what its trying to communicate and I don't even bother anymore.

But of course I'm not the average internet user.

hahla 14 years ago |

Was frustrated at first, I thought that these would be tools to help me create infogprahics without much work but instead I guess you have to use premade layouts for specific purposes?

I suppose this is your MVP since your only launching with facebook, and twitter infographics at this point which for the sake of infographics arent really useful unless your just sharing among your friends.

Who owns the right to the art at the end?

paulofisch 14 years ago | |

It looks like there are just some templates for Twitter and Facebook activity right now.

I was expecting something a little more interesting than very rigid templates. A basic and friendly tool really.

That may come in the future. For now it needs some polish.

cgarvey 14 years ago |

I feel like this site would be a lot better if it didn't purport to be an infographic creation tool at all.

The core concept of infographic templates is completely flawed. Infographics are supposed to be designed around the data which they wish to represent, so how could one design work for various sets of data? Sure you can categorize and make themes for say food or finance, but what about the scale of data? Wouldn't that be completely unique to every case?

"Create free custom infographics in seconds" should be a huge red flag for anyone wanting to actually represent data accurately.

This would be a lot more useful if it were just a showcase and maybe a place for businesses to go to find the best infographic artists and hire them for contract work.

ptvan 14 years ago | |

This is a valid concern that hinges on the predictability and consistency of the data being used.

There are two approaches to visualiation: exploratory - When you don't know what the data looks like, you use this to find out what's there. expository - When you do know the data, you can use this approach, which is what the Twitter and Facebook infographics are. We designed the templates around the known scale and range of the data.

If these templates don't work for you, there's additional variety and customization to come that will abide by standards of analysis and visualization.. :)

paulofisch 14 years ago | | |

Good to know. Will look forward to it.

I also see you've been firefighting today. Hope it's all been a learning experience, and mostly positive :)

therobot24 14 years ago |

I guess you actually have to login to twitter to get started, (though i don't have a twitter account) and to verify this i tried emailing them through their contact page but consistently only received the error, "There was an error: Invalid image code, retry !"

Further, when you try again (2nd try), the send button doesn't work. Include the non-functional "Working" and "History" buttons in the create page it's easy to conclude that this site is horribly broken.

secure 14 years ago |

Headline spelling error: s/it’s/its/