In the past few years, information design has been blossoming into a full industry. In 2014, designers and animators that specialize in information design were in higher demand than we have ever seen. Here are 14 of the top infographic designers and animators from 2014.
1. Lisa Mahapatra uses simple charts with great angles on interesting data. She excels at finding and showing the real story in data in a crystal clear, but entertaining manner.
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2. Ghergich excels at explaining slightly more complex issues. Sometimes a simple chart isn’t enough to show a process, and that’s when Ghergich’s beautiful and unique illustrative styles are useful.
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3 & 4. David Wildish and Steve Wildish are two brothers that both do fantastic illustrations. A great eye for design must run in the family, because they both produce beautifully iconic representations of the world around them. David has an eye for pop culture, distilling it all down to crisp and clean illustrations.
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Steve has a great sense of humor, and has created quite a few classics fit for framing.
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5. Combining illustrations with data is a truly impressive skill, and not many do it better than Jacob Hernandez. His illustrative style ranges from realistic to diagrammatic, but it is always effective.
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6. Sometimes a designer’s work is driven by their love of a subject. That is clearly true for Lou Spirito in his great baseball-focused graphics.
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7. Some stories are best told with a simple map. Simran Khosla does a great job with simple colors and text on world maps to show cultural and economic differences around the world.
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8. Alissa Scheller also does great infographics focused on simple charts showing data in interesting ways. This skill-set is core to information design, and Alissa is a the top of the pack.
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9 & 10. Animated infographics have become even more popular since many social media platforms have added support for them. Elanor Lutz and Jake O’Neal have both been pioneers in the medium. Elanor’s graphics focus on biological processes and other scientific subjects.
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Jake’s graphics address a range of cool topics, and all of them are better as animations than as still graphics.
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11. Full animation is a difficult discipline as it requires great timing, an ear for good audio, and still needs a good sense of design. Jot Reyes excels at all of these with Hollywood quality special effects to boot.
12. Philipp Dettmer is another superb animator. Philipp’s style is clean and simple, and he does a fantastic job with visually explaining complex processes.
13. In animation, clever transitions and animations of static elements are a key way to keeping an audience engaged and entertained. Stef Prein does a fantastic job with transitions and animations in all of his work.
14. Being nimble enough to create completely different moods with animation is an impressive skill. Andrew Davies has this ability to change the atmosphere of his animations depending on the needs of the topic.
Visually is full of a plethora of great information designers and animators producing beautiful work that helps to explain and visualize the world’s information.
Drew Skau is Visualization Architect at Visually and a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC with an undergraduate degree in Architecture. You can follow him on Twitter @SeeingStructure
