Save money (10-50%) on CorelDRAW software with these top discounts, sales & deals. See the best CorelDRAW discounts & special offers on Graphics Suite & more.

Christmas time is full of joy & stress trying to find the right gift. See our list of the best Christmas gift ideas for designers and be festive!

Courtesy of The Story of Stuff Project  Another gem from The Story of Stuff Project – this time about the dangers of tiny plastic microbeads in many products we use daily, which go down the drain and into our lakes, … Continue reading →

By Paul Kazlov While being environmentally-conscious might not always be the prettiest or flashiest way to improve your home, eco-friendly upgrades are one of the best investments you can make. After all, you can save huge money on your energy … Continue reading →

Modern American Impressionist, Meredith Brooks Abbott, is one of California’s leading plein air painters. Born in 1938 in picturesque Carpinteria, on California’s central coast, Abbott’s work focuses on the perishing rural landscape. She is a founding member of The Oak … Continue reading →

traveled a long way back home

By The National Parks Conservation Association In 2016, to celebrate the National Park Service centennial, 150 people experienced the wondrously dark night skies of Mojave National Preserve. Since 2008, these bi-annual star parties — courtesy of NPCA, Mojave National Preserve, … Continue reading →

By University of British Columbia Many people choose organic thinking it’s better for humans and the planet, but a new UBC study published today in Science Advances finds that might not always be the case. “Organic is often proposed a … Continue reading →

By Brett Israel UC Berkeley News Elemental sulfur, the most heavily used pesticide in California, may harm the respiratory health of children living near farms that use the pesticide, according to new research led by UC Berkeley. In a study … Continue reading →

A carefully planned and executed search engine optimization campaign is critical to most technology businesses’ overall digital marketing strategy. Technology companies, in particular, require a different approach to SEO than many others. They often face a highly technical target audience, prospects who thoroughly research possible solutions before making a buying decision, multiple stakeholders in the buying process, […]

The post Advanced SEO Tactics for B2B Technology Companies appeared first on 3.7 Designs.

Zach Rottman dealt with the stress of his son bringing home “bugs” from daycare by creating a table on how often the individuals of the household were sick. There are a bunch of advantages you can get from tracking “quantified self” data with visualizations, and I can appreciate this one about kids bringing home sickness from school. Not the kind of homework parents want to be dealing with.

My boy started school, my boy got sick.

As any parent could have told me, we got clobbered. Within three days, my son had Covid, and while he was only mildly sick for a day or two, he (and I) stayed home for ten. Meanwhile, my partner was out of commission for longer than that. Scarcely a week after his return our son brought home some gnarly cold—home again, not sleeping, not eating. Turns out, it’s especially hard to manage a head cold when you don’t know how to blow your nose yet and have a strong and very vocal preference against medicine. The next time it was hand, foot, and mouth disease, then RSV, followed by a slew of mysterious rashes. You get the idea. Most of the time mommy and daddy didn’t fare much better.

So, to distract me from my misery and take on a project that could plausibly be brought to fruition while also tending to a sick one-year-old, I started quantifying the sick days and built a simple web app (myboyissick.com) to see it all.

I do think the rows of 12 squares aren’t easily translatable to days or weeks on the calendar. Not a big deal when you’re designing just for yourself, but I would layout the grid to be more relatable to a calendar format.

Article found on Nightingale.

So you want to make an awesome infographic, but you aren’t sure where to start. Capsicum Mediaworks has 27 (Secrets) on How To Create An Awesome Viral Infographic in 2023.

This is definitely and example of “Do what I say, not what I do”.

There’s some fantastic information here! Ironically, this is NOT a great infographic. Saving a bunch of text as a JPG file does not make a good infographic. This infographic design goes against some of their own best advice! More visuals, less text. Make it big, not gigantic. Highlight/focus on the important points.

We all know that beautiful infographics are much more interesting as compared to long, plain text. It is the basic human tendency to associate more with anything that explains the same point with more visual appeal and less jargon.

Which is why infographics have become such a big deal.

The pictorial representation of the data, colorful backgrounds, short, to-the-point text, and easy to understand themes, are just some of the reasons why infographics have surpassed other digital marketing strategies in terms of popularity. And they are definitely here to stay.

So if you haven't jumped on this bandwagon yet, it's high time you do!

Found on Capsicum Mediaworks.

Ten years ago today, the Cool Infographics book was released on October 28, 2013. I frequently lament that it’s nice to have written a book, but the actual process of writing a book was pretty difficult.

I never set out to write a book. Wiley publishing approached me in 2011, and convinced me to turn the talk I was presenting at conferences into the outline for a new book. I had started my infographics design company, InfoNewt, in 2010, and was giving almost monthly presentations about my process to design, publish and promote infographics. Turns out that the talk outline did lend itself nicely to the structure of what became the Cool Infographics chapters.

Looking back, there were a number of unique challenges that I had to solve while putting together the book, and some were also new issues for Wiley.

Permissions to include infographics

I didn’t design most of the infographics I included in the book, because this wasn’t a book of self promotion. My goal was to share the best designs from the world of infographics as examples, and that meant including designs from some of the best designers in the world.

Here was my challenge. Most infographics are meant to be shared and reposted as much as possible online. “Going viral” was the ultimate achievement of an infographic. However, legally reprinting an infographic in a book required the explicit, signed permission of each infographic’s copyright holder. I ended up including over 100 infographic examples in the book, which was a lot of negotiation and legwork.

For every design I included, I had to track down the designer or publishing company, and get them to sign an official permission form that allowed me to include their design. I wasn’t able to include many of the designs I wanted to share because either I couldn’t track down the original designer, or they refused to sign the permission form.

Infographics are large

The online infographics that I was writing about were much larger that what could effectively be shown on the 7.3 x 9.2 inch pages of the book. They had to be reduced to fit on the pages, which made the text in many of them unreadable when sized to the book’s pages. Wiley didn’t want to publish a larger format book, so I had to come up with another idea.

My solution was that every design I included, also included a link to view the original infographic online. The downside was that readers can’t click a link in a printed book. That meant they would have to manually type in the URL, and many of the links were really long and complicated addresses. So, I created over 100 shortened links for the book, using my hosting platform from the coolinfographics.com website.

For example:

Link in the book: Coolinfographics.com/Figure-5-19

Forwards to the long original URL: http://create.mcgraw-hill.com/wordpress-mu/connectblog/files/2012/03/McGraw-Hill-Connect-Handout-WHITE-Small.jpg

See what I mean? No one was ever going to try to type in that long URL.

I also created an index web page for all of the Figures that had clickable links for every design in the book that is available to see online: coolinfographics.com/figures

Making the book navigation visual

Infographics is a very visual topic. Not only do readers want to see the visual examples of every concept I discuss in the book, but I wanted the book itself to be visual too. This took some negotiating with Wiley to make happen. Every chapter has its own color, and I included that color on every page in a small tab that prints all the way to what is called the “fore edge” of the page. This makes the color visible at the edges of the pages even when the book is closed. These tabs are staggered down the page to provide an easy navigation to find the color you see in the Table of Contents.

Marketing was my job

It turns out that most book publishing companies are very focused on publishing, printing and distributing a book, but not so much on marketing them once they get printed. Once a book is published they move on to publishing the next book, and the majority of promoting my book fell to me. This was something I didn’t expect. I am constantly teaching people that designing and publishing an infographic isn’t enough, and you have to promote it too. I wrote a whole chapter about in the Cool Infographics book! Similarly, I expected a big book publisher to be good at the promotion process for books. I was wrong. They printed a beautiful color book and got it into Amazon and onto the shelves at bookstores like Barnes & Noble, but that’s where their effort mostly ended.

Most of the promotion for the book has come from me. Whether it was one of my talks, a guest appearance on a podcast, an article that mentioned the book (like this one) or someone using Google to search for infographics and finding the Cool Infographics website.

Where to go from here?

The book has done really well for 10 years, and sales continue. The concepts I wrote about in the book are all just as relevant now, as they were 10 years ago. However, some of the example designs are out-of-date, and some of the design tools aren’t around anymore.

Where do you think we should from here? As readers of the Cool Infographics website and book, what would you like to see as ongoing content exploring the design, publishing and promotion of infographics? Videos, workshops, articles, tutorials, online courses, etc. Post a question, comment, or idea and let me know how Cool Infographics can be relevant to you in the future.

I’d love to hear from you. Either post a comment below or send me a note through the CONTACT page.

This infographic shares the depressing small amount of plastic that gets recycled. Information is Beautiful created The Problem with Plastics infographic by visualizing data by Geyer et al, Science Advances, back in 2017. The infographic uses a Sankey Diagram to show the fate of all plastics that were ever made.

Why plastic recycling doesn’t work ????

“Most ‘recycled’ plastic still ends up being dumped or incinerated”

n.b. These numbers are from 2017. Humanity produces approx. 345 million tonnes of plastic a year. That means another ~1.7 billion tonnes since this study was released.

Found on Informationisbeautiful.net

I really like this Sankey Diagram explanation of the numbers behind one of this year’s hottest political topics in the U.S.: How to Fix America’s Immigration Crisis. The original article adds a scrolly-telling element that makes it even better by slowly revealing each branch and explaining the data.

I know this article is hidden behind the NY Times paywall. If you’re not a NY Times subscriber you can try to view the original article with this LINK or try using reader mode on your browser. Let me know if this link doesn’t work, and I’ll try to post a new one.

The Quickest Route to Washington DC is a GIS visualization from @ArterialMapping (also known as MattMDL on reddit)

From @ArterialMapping:

How was this map completed? Well, using @Esri ArcGIS Pro Network Analysis toolset! In general terms, there were 4 steps:

1. Created a dot grid for the whole of the continental U.S. This grid is what enables the routes to be created to D.C. A dot was also created for D.C.

2. Run Network Analysis to find the shortest route to D.C. from each dot.

3. Run a calculation for the number of overlapping routes (shown as the stronger strokes on the roadways)

4. Then, of the 4 main spokes I saw, I copied them over into their own layers and colored them accordingly.

Red generally follows I-70 to I-270, Green generally follows I-81 to I-66, Blue generally follows I-95 south of D.C., Orange generally follows I-95 north of D.C.

The Mammoth Cost of Operating America’s Combat Aircraft shows the operating cost per aircraft in 2018. Statista created this infographic when the non-partisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an overview of mission capable rates and the cost of operating U.S. military aircraft in 2020. Over 40 aircrafts were examined, Statista chose to highlight these 15 in their infographic.

The non-partisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released an overview of mission capable rates and the cost of operating U.S. military aircraft. It examined more than 40 different aircraft types, finding that only three of them reached their mission capable goals between fiscal years 2011 and 2019. In total, the report put the collective cost of operating all of the U.S. military's aircraft fleets at $49 billion in fiscal year 2018, taking operational & support (O&S) costs such as maintenance as well as supply support in account. O&S generally makes up 70 percent of a weapon system's total life cycle costs and it includes spare parts, depot and field maintenance, contract services, engineering support and personnel, amongst other factors.

It would be nice to see how many we have in service too. The stacked bars work well. As a reader you can tell the values between operating/support and maintenance, but the total is what matters.

Read more at Statista

Many photographers jump the gun when it comes to pricing photos for sale online. Psychology plays a underestimated role when your customers are ready to buy, so it’s important to have an effective pricing strategy. Don’t blow pricing strategies under the rug. Your prices determine the success or failure of your business. If you apply the […]

Image piracy is a real issue that affects all photographers who publish their work online. Having to deal with issues such as image theft is a source of frustration for many. Thankfully, Google Images licensable badge ushers in new opportunities for photographers to capture referrals and sales directly from Google Images searchers. For years, the […]

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Military service is difficult, dangerous, and demanding. But for some veterans, returning to civilian life can also be a challenge. Going from the structure of active duty—with its purpose-driven roles, full-throttle environment, and sense of camaraderie—to the relatively humdrum life of a civilian can be jarring, particularly for veterans who’ve experienced trauma during their service and may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Researchers at Boston University, including Dawne Vogt and Casey Taft—both professors of psychiatry in the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine—are utilizing a variety of data-backed strategies to support veterans struggling to adapt to their new normal lives. 

A commentary, published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, calls for traumatic brain injury to be recognized as a chronic condition as are diabetes, asthma, depression and heart failure. To provide comprehensive care for traumatic brain injury throughout individuals' lifespans, the authors propose that coordinated care models they and others have developed, tested and applied to various populations—including older adults, individuals living with depression and post-intensive care unit survivors—be adapted to improve communication and integration between brain injury specialists—including physical medicine and rehabilitation clinicians—and primary care physicians, fostering better long-term patient care for traumatic brain injury survivors and more support for both patients and their families.

New research data offers much-needed hope for veterans wrestling with combat-associated posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study explores the use of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) to address symptoms that persist despite standard treatments.

The pounding that sailors’ brains take from years of high-speed wave-slamming in the Special Boat Teams can cause symptoms that wreck their careers — and their lives.

NRCgov posted a photo:

Chair Hanson touring parts of the Mayo Clinic’s nuclear medicine and radiation oncology departments and some equipment used for treating cancer and other medical issues.

Visit the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's website at www.nrc.gov/.
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NRCgov posted a photo:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), a Massachusetts 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect computer user freedom, seeks a motivated and talented individual, if possible Boston-based, to be our full-time outreach and communications coordinator.

BOSTON (August 27, 2024) -- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Board Member Odile Bénassy has stepped down from the Board after four years of service.

BOSTON (October 8, 2024) -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that it is taking part in the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s consortium on the safety of (so-called) artificial intelligence, particularly with reference to "generative" AI systems. The FSF will ensure the free software perspective is adequately represented in these discussions.

BOSTON (October 22, 2024) -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced today that it is working on a statement of criteria for free machine learning applications, which will require the software, as well as the raw training data and associated scripts, to grant users the four freedoms.

Modern bioassays tend to fall under three common modalities: colorimetric, luminometric or fluorometric. Colorimetric assays record the amount of light abs

Researchers went 'bioprospecting' in marine microbes, looking for those that can perform helpful functions like eating plastic or generating antibiotics.

RNA does many things in the body. Now, scientists have shown that RNA in blood samples can be used as a diagnostic indicator.

All complex life on Earth, including plants and animals, are made up of eukaryotic cells, which are more sophisticated than bacterial or archaeal cells..

The optimal use of a microplate can significantly accelerate research and discovery. Making good use of recommendations learnt from different research sett

The MA900 Multi-Application Cell Sorter is a versatile and automated system that can transform laboratory workflow, enabling seamless sorting of a range of

The fascinating and remote Rapa Nui or Easter Island, is ~2,000 km from the nearest Polynesian island and 3,700 km west of South America.

Drug discovery and stem-cell-based therapies remain pivotal areas of scientific research, with a growing focus on three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures. How

Our immune systems generate antibodies that neutralize and help eliminate foreign pathogens. These antibodies or proteins are generated by specific immune

There are millions of people around the world who deal with chronic itching with no clear cause, or chronic pruritus of unknown origin (CPUO)