We arrived in Seoul on Monday. It’s 5W’s seventh trip to Asia in the last year, but our first time in South Korea. The Government has invited us to participate as one of a small handful of foreign companies to participate in the Korea Design Businees Fair, one of the largest design events in Asia. It includes several hundred exhibitors, and also features the winners of the Red Dot Design Awards, Design Excellence Awards, and Good Design Awards, among others. It’s open to both the general public and product design buyers (largely from China, Korea and Japan).

The Fair is mostly dedicated to industrial and product design, but this year the organization was interested in bringing in a firm specialized in information design. Its a great opportunity to witness the design boom in Korea, a highly developed market with a tech-savvy public and an interest in quality design products. Korea is quickly changing from follower to trend-setter in the design world, finding and showcasing its unique sensibility. We are looking forward to seeing and learning more.

Following the success of the previous workshop in January, we are coming back to Singapore on May 21-22 with our Power of Infographics workshop. The event is hosted by Methodology in partnership with Gestalten, the German leading publishers specialized in visual culture.

The two-day workshop by 5W’s co-founder Juan Velasco (ex Graphics Art Director at The New York Times and ex-Art Director of National Geographic magazine) will be a comprehensive review of information graphics and data visualization, both in print and online. We’ll have a chance to create hands-on work running through the entire process: gathering and preparing data, working with statistics in Excel, sketching, storyboarding… By the end of the workshop the attendant wills have a completely sketched-out illustrated infographic with multiple components and a functioning online data visualization including interactive charts and maps. We’ll use the free Tableau Public for our interactive exercises.

Juan will also provide numerous lectures on the theory and practice of information graphics showing step-by-step examples of award-winning infographics and covering the latest trends. We’ll learn which charts are best to use for different types of data; what type of maps are useful to give insight into our data sets or to locate stories, and how they are created; the tools and processes for successful motion graphics… We will also experiment with hierarchy, color, typography, illustration, and narrative to create effective infographics that make an impact.

Seats are going fast! Reserve yours now by emailing admin@methodology.sg

We were back to South East Asia at the end of March to teach information graphics and data visualization workshops in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) and Jakarta (Indonesia). Both events were focused on interactive graphics, data visualization and the print-to-web challenge.

The workshops were organized by WAN-IFRA, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. WAN-IFRA is a global organization representing more than 18,000 publications, 15,000 online sites and over 3,000 companies in more than 120 countries.

In Malaysia, we were hosted by Media Prima group, a leading Malaysian publishing company. The participants were designers and editors from The New Straits Times, the group’s English-language newspaper and the oldest newspaper in Malaysia (1845); Berita Harian (BH), a mainstream newspaper in Malay; and Harian Metro, a popular human interest daily and the largest newspaper of Malaysia in any language.

In Jakarta, we worked with Kompas, the largest circulation newspaper in South East Asia, and surely one of the best. Kompas has excellent print design (it was redesigned by Mario Garcia). They have had a digital presence for some time, including nice tablet offerings, and they are now trying to enhance their infographics online. They do plenty of really nice print infographics, like this one about the pinisi, a traditional Indonesian two-masted sailing ship.