Emerging across the realm of social media as of late, are highly appealing and crowd friendly images called infographics. These vertically long images are graphic representations of information, statistics, and news aimed to portray information, quickly and concisely. 

 

After the first game of the year, the Penn State Football Twitter and Facebook accounts released an infographic detailing stats, quotes, honors, and highlights from the Syracuse game the day before. The post garnered thousands of likes on the Facebook page and many comments were in favor of the design and layout. Included in the image was the quote of the game, tweet of the game and offensive and defensive player of the game. In addition the graphic showed a myriad of graphs in different forms to show the team comparisons of yardage, first downs, turnovers and more.

 

The following week after the Eastern Michigan game, Penn State released one again.

 

In a visual driven society, these captivating infographics satisfy the increasingly short attention span of consumers today. They can be perused quickly and dozens of stats and facts can be divulged. I personally learned more about the game in less than a minute than I would have if I looked at the box score in the newspaper or online.

 

These infographics have been widely used by both professional and college sports teams in the past few weeks. In the NFL the likes of The Oakland Raiders, San Francisco 49ers, and Minnesota Vikings to name a few, have recapped or previewed their games using infographics.

 

A multitude of college football teams have released these the past few weeks as well including Oregon State, Michigan State and Auburn. 

 

All of these images are different in terms of layout and information presented, however prove to be the same in terms of captivation and effectiveness amongst fans.

 

My favorite graphics that I have seen have been the ones from the 49ers. They encompass both a comprehensive recap and preview with readable yet complex graphics that are released weekly on their website. As seen here.

 

When searching for who creates these graphics I stumbled upon a website called visual.ly. Their about page explains that they are: “a one-stop shop for the creation of data visualizations and infographics, bringing together Marketing Gurus, Data Nerds and Design Junkies based on shared interests.”  With over 35,000 designers and even more designs they describe themselves as the world's largest community of infographics and data visualization.

 

The wave and craze of infographics is here to stay and will only prove to catch on with more teams organizations and companies!