The Visual Vocabulary Pack includes: Individual hand-sketched icons in PNG and vector format, Compilation pages for printing or quick-viewing of all icons, Suggestions for how to use these icons to better capture, process, and share ideas. If you're ready to communicate visually but need help getting started, this pack will fit you well. More info at www.verbaltovisual.com/resources. Happy sketching, Doug

Infographics, data visualizations, and interactive visual projects are popular for a reason. They capture imaginations, command attention, and teach new things. Above all, however, they are simply fun to look at. If you’ve spent some time getting lost in all of the projects on Visually’s community page, you know what I mean. As visual content has exploded in popularity over the past few years, so have the places to discover the best ones. Check out five of our favorites below. 1. I Love Charts  Curated by: Jason Oberholtzer, Cody Westphal, “Chartists in Residence” | @ilovecharts I Love Charts is one of the best known visual blogs on the web. Created by Jason Oberholtzer and Cody Westphal in 2009, the Tumblr has been going strong ever since. There are multiple posts every day from either Oberholtzer, Westphal, or their team of Chartists, who contribute a wide range of content. I Love Charts:... keep reading

One of the topics I was asked about recently by Vocus was about the influence of visual content. I wanted to add some color to my original remarks, which you can find here. Visual content is the fancypants new term for what we used to call rich media, and it’s in fact a subset of [...]

The details about the following nine word cloud generators will give you a fair idea how, as an educator, you can get the best out of them.

SumAll.org and Humanitarian Tracker teamed up with WIRED UK to visualize data about the killing of women and girls in Syria.





Image via WIRED UK





SumAll.org has been working with Humanitarian Tracker since early 2013 to analyze causes of death for civilians in the Syria crisis using crowdsourced and verified data. Our work was featured in the July 2014 issue of WIRED UK in an infographic titled War’s Wheel of Destruction, which illustrates the causes of death for women and girls. The infographic highlights specific types of killings, identifying them as targeted attacks, in pink, or collateral damage, in yellow.












War’s Wheel of Destruction from WIRED UK (July 2014).
Copy - Madhu Venkataramanan; Illustration - Signal Noise.







Crowdsourcing Crisis Data Collection



Crowdsourcing is all the rage. Yet while usually associated with funding creative projects or providing resources to students, crowdsourcing can also be leveraged as a critical tool in times of crisis. From the earthquake in Haiti to Hurricane Sandy, citizens and civic techies have joined together to use crowdsourcing as a way to quickly gather information in times of crisis. The data collected from these sources can send rapid alerts to humanitarian organizations, while also providing critical information for journalists, stakeholders and citizens.





SumAll.org’s partner Humanitarian Tracker is a crowdsourcing initiative developed by Syrian-Americans based in the United States. Syria Tracker, a project of Humanitarian Tracker, has been crowdsourcing information on casualties in Syria since April 2011; they rely primarily on existing networks and organizations in Syria that submit online reports to their website. They also carry out data-mining of social media and produce separate aggregate reports on deaths and other violations. Syria Tracker makes all of its aggregated and disaggregated data available on its website.





For more information on female, and other, killings in Syria, see our white paper: Rising Proportion of Female Deaths in Syria and our interactive dashboard. Additional information on this project is available on SumAll.org’s website.

The inspiration for your next visual content project is probably hiding right under your nose. Here are six easy ways to find your next standout piece.

This guide will help you find and correctly attribute public domain and Creative Commons images for your project or presentation.

Aaron Lee of Post Planner shares tops tips for 8 Ways To Use Visuals To Market Your Business on Facebook

Discover Instagram best practices for brands and why it’s important for them to tap into this mega social network.