It is a nice late-summer morning. You wake up, make yourself a nice cup of coffee, sit down at your computer (or lay down with your iPad), and navigate to your usual news outlets to see what’s new with the world today. Then you see it, just there, staring right back at you, the cup of coffee stopped in mid-air in its trajectory to your lips: an infographic so massively bad, so wrong, so ignorant of the most elementary principles of information design, it defies your sense or reality.

It is amazing how in some organizations and newsrooms the idea is still alive that anyone that can more or less use a drawing program on a computer can do an infographic, despite a complete lack of training and experience in the field. The results, often ignoring even the most fundamental principles, are sometimes unintendedly funny.

In our workshops we show a few superbad graphics in order to illustrate some basic principles (the lack of). We thought it would be interesting to show here some of them, perhaps as a public service, in the hope we will be able in the future of having our morning coffee in peace, free of disturbing infographical surprises.

Enjoy!

iPhone math blackhole:

Wait, what?:

The infinity pie:

This is not going to end well:

I think I am going blind:

Nice (insane) metaphor:

Obviously:

Agreed:

Even the Masters:

These are just a few random examples. There are so many bad infographics out there a simple Google search produce thousands of them. Here and here are other compilations of horrible infographics you may enjoy.