Many people who get interested in infographics ask us if you can create them without knowing how to draw. Definitely yes! Or at least the vast majority of infographics (data visualizations and charts, maps, timelines, graphics with schematic illustrations, and many others) don’t require strong drawing skills.

Something that is more difficult you would actually think is drawing simple icons or pictograms. They are invaluable to add some visual interest and to summarize categories and groups in tables, text-based designs and different kinds of infographics. They must be simple yet elegant and recognizable.

And speaking about icons here is something interesting from Google’s AI labs. AutoDraw is a web-based tool that turns your quick doodles into nice and elegant pictograms you can use with your designs and infographics. As you start drawing, the application will start matching your doodles to its library of objects, in a similar fashion to the auto-correct feature we are familiar with when we type text. It’s pretty accurate!

Objects can be colored, resized, rotated and moved. At the end, you can download a png file with your drawing or share it with other people.

The app is free and it works on any phone, computer or table. Google calls it “fast drawing for everyone”, and it’s one of their several machine learning experiments. You may chuckle a little at the simplicity of the drawings and yes, the tools is still pretty basic. But it’s not hard to imagine that with the current strong push in artificial intelligence and machine learning in few years we’ll see pretty amazing things in this field. Hopefully AI won’t put us out of business!. You can contribute to the growing collection of AutoDraw drawings here.

Here is video explain AutoDraw:

We were in New York last week doing a corporate workshop for New York Life MainStay Investments. The investment management company is part of New York Life, the largest mutual life insurance company in the United States, and one of the largest insurers in the world.

As with other clients we work with, New York Life MainStay Investments produces large amounts of complex information that needs to be communicated with efficiency, precision and an attractive design. They market securities and different financial instruments and meed to provide advisors and clients with reliable information about performance, risks and how different investments compare to others though a variety of brochures, factsheets, fund “snapshots”, online dashboards, PowerPoint presentations and so on.

In the two-day workshop we discussed the difference between insightful charts that help clarify information and the decorative presentations that add little value and are commonplace everywhere; content and visual choices, alternative approaches to telling stories visually, overall design issues, achieving style consistency across an organization’s output of charts and graphics, and more. We typically mix presentations with hand-on exercises that emphasize hand sketching, and also introduce participants to the creation of online data visualizations with Tableau.

For information on our corporate workshops, reach us at contact@5wgraphics.com.

New York Life Mainstay Investments is located in Jersey City in an iconic building right across Manhattan:

The views of the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline are stunning!

Just a few days ago we came back from another good trip teaching workshops in Asia. We spent the first week in Singapore, our “base” in Asia since we have been there so many times. We keep good clients and friends in the city-state.

The first workshop was the public course we hold every few months in Singapore: The Power of Infographics, hosted by our friends at Methodology. The two-day workshop is a broad overview of the concepts and techniques behind infographics and data visualization, with plenty of hands-on sketching and exercises (including the creation of some online interactives with Tableau). The workshop attendees are public servants from different branches of government, as well as designers, students and educators.

The next two workshops were private two-day courses for one of the largest banks in Asia. We did the first one in Singapore and the second one in their offices in Mumbai, India. They have previously invited us to Jakarta and Kong Kong as well.

Large organizations have to deal with massive amounts of data, written reports and presentations, for internal communications or for public outreach. There is a growing interest in learning about how infographics can help find insight and reveal the key messages in a visual and more effective way.

To know more about our workshops visit our website or send us an email to contact@5wgraphics.com

By the way, we found a nice surprise while browsing at Kinokuniya, a great bookstore in Singapore: our book “Look Inside” was in the shelves! It’s exciting to see that is well distributed and selling well.

How many billionaires there are in the world, and where are they? Where do they fortunes come from, and what are their hobbies? We just published a nice full-page infographic at The New York Times’ Sunday edition answering those and more questions. It’s based on research by Wealth-X, a firm that maintains a regularly updated database of information on the superrich.

By the end of 2015, there were 2,473 people with more than a billion dollars in wealth. If we compare the combined wealth of this select group with that of entire countries (measured by G.D.P as a proxy) they would be only behind the U.S. and China, and ahead of Japan, Germany and all other nations on the world. New York, Hong Kong and Moscow top the list of billionaires by city.

The U.S. has the most billionaires with 585 followed by China with 260. Looking at continents, Europe has the largest number with 806, but Asia (645) is showing the fastest growth.

The main visual in the infographic is an stylized cartogram with the size of countries (shown by squares) representing the number of billionaires in those countries that have at least one.

The are 8.4 billionaire men for each woman. 60 percent of the men’s fortunes are self-made but only 16.5 percent of billionaire women have self-made fortunes.

It was a nice project art directed by Corinne Myller and published on a special section on Wealth on Sunday February 26.