visual data

Infographics have quickly become the bane of the Web since exploding in popularity over the past year. The number of poor designs, empty stats, bias and sketchy sources are enough to make any design-conscious person cringe, but that’s because infographics aren’t any different from any other sort of design; there’s good and bad work out there, and the latter always outweighs the former. In other words, the average website isn’t going to be beautiful or useful, but that doesn’t mean the gems aren’t worth it.

With that in mind, I’d like to draw your attention to Visual.ly. The data-driven startup continues to grow as a place for designers to come together over visualizations and infographics, and today the company is launching a completely “revamped” design, with social features that let users like, share and follow their favorite topics, users and designers.

Visual.ly’s redesign brings a much stronger community element into the site, which could help strengthen the startup’s existing user-base, while helping to highlight and promote the best work. So far content has been key, and now social is raising in importance for the site’s 32K designers and nearly 145K users...