skip to main content
10.1145/3313831.3376263acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Exploring Visual Information Flows in Infographics

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Infographics are engaging visual representations that tell an informative story using a fusion of data and graphical elements. The large variety of infographic design poses a challenge for their high-level analysis. We use the concept of Visual Information Flow (VIF), which is the underlying semantic structure that links graphical elements to convey the information and story to the user. To explore VIF, we collected a repository of over 13K infographics. We use a deep neural network to identify visual elements related to information, agnostic to their various artistic appearances. We construct the VIF by automatically chaining these visual elements together based on Gestalt principles. Using this analysis, we characterize the VIF design space by a taxonomy of 12 different design patterns. Exploring in a real-world infographic dataset, we discuss the design space and potentials of VIF in light of this taxonomy.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (paper136vf.mp4)
Supplemental video
MP4 File (paper136pv.mp4)
Preview video
MP4 File (a136-lu-presentation.mp4)

References

[1]
Fereshteh Amini, Nathalie Henry Riche, Bongshin Lee, Andres Monroy-Hernandez, and Pourang Irani. 2017. Authoring data-driven videos with dataclips. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 23, 1 (2017), 501--510.
[2]
Benjamin Bach, Zezhong Wang, Matteo Farinella, Dave Murray-Rust, and Nathalie Henry Riche. 2018. Design Patterns for Data Comics. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, Article 38, 12 pages.
[3]
Scott Bateman, Regan L Mandryk, Carl Gutwin, Aaron Genest, David McDine, and Christopher Brooks. 2010. Useful junk?: the effects of visual embellishment on comprehension and memorability of charts. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2573--2582.
[4]
Jacci Howard Bear. 2019. Find Out If Your Page Layout Is in Balance. https://www.lifewire.com/balance-in-design-1078231. (February 02 2019). Bear2019.
[5]
Michelle A Borkin, Azalea A Vo, Zoya Bylinskii, Phillip Isola, Shashank Sunkavalli, Aude Oliva, and Hanspeter Pfister. 2013. What makes a visualization memorable? IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, 12 (2013), 2306--2315.
[6]
Steven Bradley. 2015. Design Principles: Compositional Flow And Rhythm. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/04/designprinciples-compositional-flow-and-rhythm/. (April 29 2015). Bradley2015.
[7]
Jean M Brechman. 2010. Narrative "flow": A model of narrative processing and its impact on information processing, knowledge acquisition and persuasion. (2010).
[8]
M. Brehmer, B. Lee, B. Bach, N. H. Riche, and T. Munzner. 2017. Timelines Revisited: A Design Space and Considerations for Expressive Storytelling. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 23, 9 (Sep. 2017), 2151--2164.
[9]
Zoya Bylinskii, Sami Alsheikh, Spandan Madan, Adria Recasens, Kimberli Zhong, Hanspeter Pfister, Fredo Durand, and Aude Oliva. 2017a. Understanding infographics through textual and visual tag prediction. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.09215 (2017).
[10]
Zoya Bylinskii, Nam Wook Kim, Peter O'Donovan, Sami Alsheikh, Spandan Madan, Hanspeter Pfister, Fredo Durand, Bryan Russell, and Aaron Hertzmann. 2017b. Learning visual importance for graphic designs and data visualizations. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. ACM, 57--69.
[11]
Zhutian Chen, Yun Wang, Qianwen Wang, Yong Wang, and Huamin Qu. 2019. Towards Automated Infographic Design: Deep Learning-based Auto-Extraction of Extensible Timeline. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 26, 1 (2019), 917--926.
[12]
Laurens Van Der Maaten and Geoffrey E Hinton. 2008. Visualizing Data using t-SNE. Journal of Machine Learning Research 9 (2008), 2579--2605.
[13]
Agné Desolneux, Lionel Moisan, and Jean-Michel Morel. 2004. Gestalt theory and computer vision. (2004), 71--101.
[14]
Martin Ester, Hans-Peter Kriegel, Jörg Sander, Xiaowei Xu, and others. 1996. A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases with noise. In Kdd, Vol. 96. 226--231.
[15]
Johanna Fulda, Matthew Brehmel, and Tamara Munzner. 2016. Timelinecurator: Interactive authoring of visual timelines from unstructured text. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 22, 1 (2016), 300--309.
[16]
Ross Girshick. 2015. Fast r-cnn. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision. 1440--1448.
[17]
Steve Haroz, Robert Kosara, and Steven L Franconeri. 2015. Isotype visualization: Working memory, performance, and engagement with pictographs. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1191--1200.
[18]
Lane Harrison, Katharina Reinecke, and Remco Chang. 2015. Infographic aesthetics: Designing for the first impression. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1187--1190.
[19]
Jeffrey Heer and George Robertson. 2007. Animated transitions in statistical data graphics. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 13, 6 (2007), 1240--1247.
[20]
Weiyin Hong, James YL Thong, and Kar Yan Tam. 2004. Does animation attract online users' attention? The effects of flash on information search performance and perceptions. Information Systems Research 15, 1 (2004), 60--86.
[21]
Jessica Hullman, Steven Drucker, Nathalie Henry Riche, Bongshin Lee, Danyel Fisher, and Eytan Adar. 2013. A Deeper Understanding of Sequence in Narrative Visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, 12 (Dec. 2013), 2406--2415.
[22]
Ian Jolliffe. 2011. Principal component analysis. In International encyclopedia of statistical science. Springer, 1094--1096.
[23]
Nam Wook Kim, Zoya Bylinskii, Michelle A Borkin, Krzysztof Z Gajos, Aude Oliva, Fredo Durand, and Hanspeter Pfister. 2017. BubbleView: an interface for crowdsourcing image importance maps and tracking visual attention. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 24, 5 (2017), 36.
[24]
Nam Wook Kim, Eston Schweickart, Zhicheng Liu, Mira Dontcheva, Wilmot Li, Jovan Popovic, and Hanspeter Pfister. 2016. Data-driven guides: Supporting expressive design for information graphics. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 23, 1 (2016), 491--500.
[25]
Ranjitha Kumar, Arvind Satyanarayan, Cesar Torres, Maxine Lim, Salman Ahmad, Scott R Klemmer, and Jerry O Talton. 2013. Webzeitgeist: design mining the web. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 3083--3092.
[26]
Bongshin Lee, Rubaiat Habib Kazi, and Greg Smith. 2013. SketchStory: Telling more engaging stories with data through freeform sketching. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, 12 (2013), 2416--2425.
[27]
Thomas F Liu, Mark Craft, Jason Situ, Ersin Yumer, Radomir Mech, and Ranjitha Kumar. 2018a. Learning Design Semantics for Mobile Apps. In The 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. ACM, 569--579.
[28]
Wei Liu, Dragomir Anguelov, Dumitru Erhan, Christian Szegedy, Scott Reed, Cheng-Yang Fu, and Alexander C Berg. 2016. Ssd: Single shot multibox detector. In European conference on computer vision. Springer, 21--37.
[29]
Zhicheng Liu, John Thompson, Alan Wilson, Mira Dontcheva, James Delorey, Sam Grigg, Bernard Kerr, and John Stasko. 2018b. Data Illustrator: Augmenting Vector Design Tools with Lazy Data Binding for Expressive Visualization Authoring. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, Article 123, 13 pages.
[30]
Sean McKenna, N Henry Riche, Bongshin Lee, Jeremy Boy, and M Meyer. 2017. Visual narrative flow: Exploring factors shaping data visualization story reading experiences. In Computer Graphics Forum, Vol. 36. Wiley Online Library, 377--387.
[31]
Joseph Redmon, Santosh Divvala, Ross Girshick, and Ali Farhadi. 2016. You only look once: Unified, real-time object detection. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. 779--788.
[32]
Babak Saleh, Mira Dontcheva, Aaron Hertzmann, and Zhicheng Liu. 2015. Learning Style Similarity for Searching Infographics. In Proceedings of the 41st Graphics Interface Conference (GI '15). 59--64.
[33]
Arvind Satyanarayan and Jeffrey Heer. 2014. Authoring Narrative Visualizations with Ellipsis. Computer Graphics Forum 33 (2014), 361--370.
[34]
Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer. 2010. Narrative visualization: Telling stories with data. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 16, 6 (2010), 1139--1148.
[35]
Teo Siang. 2019. The Building Blocks of Visual Design. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/thebuilding-blocks-of-visual-design. (March 2019).
[36]
Martin van den Berg, Michael Kubovy, and James A Schirillo. 2011. Grouping by regularity and the perception of illumination. Vision research 51, 12 (2011), 1360--1371.
[37]
Yun Wang, Haidong Zhang, He Huang, Xi Chen, Qiufeng Yin, Zhitao Hou, Dongmei Zhang, Qiong Luo, and Huamin Qu. 2018. InfoNice: Easy creation of information graphics. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 335.
[38]
Nanxuan Zhao, Ying Cao, and Rynson WH Lau. 2018. What characterizes personalities of graphic designs? ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 37, 4 (2018), 116.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Exploring Visual Information Flows in Infographics

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2020
    10688 pages
    ISBN:9781450367080
    DOI:10.1145/3313831
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 23 April 2020

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. design analysis
    2. infographics
    3. visual information flow

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    • National Natural Science Foundation of China
    • Guangdong Provincial NSF
    • Shenzhen Innovation Program

    Conference

    CHI '20
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)233
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)13
    Reflects downloads up to 14 Sep 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    HTML Format

    View this article in HTML Format.

    HTML Format

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media