Today it’s easy to be overloaded by information. To combat the bombardment of world news, trends, and trivial facts, a specialized field of graphic design has flowered with the promise to help marketers make your word-centric Web sites, PowerPoint presentations, pitch material and other communications more compelling and easier to absorb. The field sometimes called as “information visualization” takes on the daunting task of creating simple and clear ways of displaying complex information. For years, this has been referred to as information design.

The most recent example of this field of information presentation is tag clouds—a mix of words in varying weights and sizes to convey frequency of usage and, thus, importance. In his article, “Is Information Visualization the Next Frontier for Design?” Michael Cannell hints that this niche in design can and will evolve. Other examples mentioned in Cannell’s article include an interactive map of the swine flu and a map of Web trends that takes inspiration from a metro system map. An impressive amount of visualization examples can be found on the Visual Complexity site, http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/.

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Check out some more examples of info graphics