I wanted to share a few ideas for creating infographics with you as you start work on your application projects.
- Option 1 – Use visual.ly, an online tool for creating infographics. I haven’t used it, but I’ve heard great things about it, and I’d love to learn how to use it. I think it’s basically free.
- Option 2 – Use R. I’m pretty comfortable troubleshooting in R if you need help. See below for some resources on using R to create data visualizations. You can export your R plots as PNG or PDF files, then insert them into a PowerPoint or Prezi you use to design the infographic as a whole.
- Option 3 – Use Excel. I’m pretty comfortable troubleshooting in Excel, too. You would need to export these plots into PowerPoint or Prezi, just like with R.
- Option 4 – Use some other program, like Adobe Illustrator or the free, open-source alternative to Illustrator, Inkscape. I don’t know these tools, however, so I probably won’t be able to help you if you get stuck. See this list of tools from Steven Anderson and these ideas for creating infographics from Chris Clark for other possibilities.
Whatever tool you use, be sure you can output an infographic that I can embed one way or another here on the blog. Let me know if you have questions about output options.
Help with R
Flowing Data has some useful tutorials for creating particular data visualizations in R:
The heatmap tutorial includes a section on color selection. R has a few built-in color palettes, including cm (cyan-magenta) and heat (warm colors), both seen in the tutorial. Other palettes include rainbow, terrain, and topo. You can type things like “?rainbow” in R to find out the parameters for these palettes.
See the Quick-R tutorials on basic graphs and advanced graphs for more R commands useful for data visualization. I used the Flowing Data and Quick-R tutorials, along with R’s help files and a little Internet searching, to create the visualizations back on Problem Set 1.