For the third year I was asked to be a judge for the infographics section of annual SOPA awards. http://www.sopawards.com/
Once again it was an eye opener, in some ways for bad reasons because overall standards have not improved in three years of judging this competition. All the improvements have come from one publication, the South China Morning Post, which has become a recognised world leader for news graphics. The rest were hardly worth looking at.
The good thing about this of course is that there is still room for a major news graphics service to define and lead the way in the development of a wire-type service. That should be us right? To move towards that goal we have had some interesting innovations on style-templates and new product formats, but I think we still need to clarify exactly what our editorial and design values are.
One interesting exercise could be in looking at ‘bad’ examples from the competition and discussing how we would edit them. There are plenty to choose from!
This year’s SOPA entries were of low quality except for the top two. One entry was disqualified from the shortlist after I received a quiery from the organisers asking why I had placed it last in my rankings while others judged it a runner-up.
I explained that graphic had a fatal flaw in that it incorporated external material that hadn’t been edited correctly. I suggested that the other judges should be asked to rethink their allocation of scores. The result was that the graphic got dropped from the shortlist. I was quite dismayed that other judges hadn’t spotted the obvious problem.
Here’s the rest and the marks I gave.
Overview: Beautiful
Subject matter: Fascinating
Quality of visuals: Superb
Details: Fantastic use of hand drawing. Attractive and strong bull image at center. Overall composition is well balanced with carefully chosen elements to illustrate the topic. Fascinating look at facial details placed all around the edge of the graphic, including a focus on hair styles at the bottom. This graphic completely stands out from the rest of the entries and is a clear-cut winner.
Text/visual integraton: Superb
Score: 10
(UPDATE June 11. Predictably this graphic won and they used my quote in the presentation.
Overview: Beautiful
Subject matter: Interesting on the purely physical level, but the premise about height and social values is not coherently demonstrated
Quality of visuals: excellent
Details: great hand drawings. Simple charting. Good composition. Can’t see what lessons there are about social values when today’s highest buildings are classed as “mixed-use”
Text/visual integraton: Good.
Score: 9
Overview: Cluttered
Subject matter: Tragic and fascinating
Quality of visuals: Mixed. Almost balanced. Bad move on national flags, creates design clash. Similar problem with the FlightRadar type screen grab, not a bad gimmick but design clash. You can detect AFP influence in this, though I hope clients can tell the difference in the quality of the edit.
Details: There are some problems such as too much prominence given to flight paths of other airlines and a meaningless box about the coincidence with the number 17. Also the 3D map effect is incongruous, though the dominance of the map is a good thing in that position.
This graphic is not in the same league as the top two and unfortunately its position as third best reflects the disappointingly low quality of the rest of the entries.
Text/visual integraton: Not bad.
Score: 8
Overview: Cluttered. Bull image buried
Subject matter: Quite boring
Quality of visuals: Main image should have been edited better to bring out the main illustration.
Details: Really dull
Text/visual integraton: OK but dull
Score: 7
Overview: OK
Subject matter: quite boring
Quality of visuals: Good use of a photo. Lame charts
Details: What currency is the profit/loss in? Charting fleets with bubble charts strange. Better to count out. Market share is almost always most effective as pie chart or a variation of one. No size differentiation in the chart for footprints. Also confusingly labelled. The two bar charts are the most straightforward presentations.
Text/visual integraton: Nicely edited with photo.
Score: 6
Overview: An eyesore
Subject matter: Locally interesting
Quality of visuals: Strangely mixed. Buildings drawn from mixed perspectives. Looks like clip-art from various sources thrown together without any effort to format into a single illustration
Details: At first you assume that the buildings are drawn to scale but that isn’t the case, which is misleading. Also confusing that the Lippo centre appears twice, if it isn’t repeated for the sake of scale why is it shown twice? Baffling.
Text/visual integraton: Fine, but that’ snot the issue.
Score: 5
Overview: Confusing.
Subject matter: Totally subjective
Quality of visuals: Weak, clip art, lame charts.
Details: Utterly inane graphic on ridiculous data. 54% of respondents think there are “just enough” ramen restaurants in Manila. Enough said.
Text/visual integraton: Ok but so what
Score: 4
Overview: Lame. Suedo illustrative. Lack of hierarchy.
Subject matter: Potentially interesting but made to look quite boring
Quality of visuals: low. Clip-arty.
Details: Text unclear and badly edited. Bureaucratic and dull.
Text/visual integraton: Relies on the main illustration to bring component parts together. Works ok, but as the main illustration is of low quality it looses effect.
Score: 3
Overview: Interesting but confusing
Subject matter: Potentially interesting if comprehensible
Quality of visuals: Low quality. Main illustration looks spectacular but faded. Overall it looks mad.
Details: Lacks clear explanations. Subhead seems to mix fact with myth.
Text/visual integraton: Good mix of text and images, only problem is that it makes no sense at all.
Score: 2
Disqualified: Storm reslilient school
Overview: Quite clean on first viewing but difficult to comprehend as you try to understand the graphic.
Subject matter: Potentially interesting
Quality of visuals: Mixed.
Details: Terrible use of a hand out image makes this graphic unsuitable for consideration in any competition. Not only is the layout plan badly labelled with jarring red lines but original labels are partially left in, including partial words and new text made illegible by overlaying on old text.
Text/visual integraton: Irrelevant as this graphic makes no sense.
Score: 1
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