There’s no easy way to divide this one, so I’m just going to give it to you in one overwhelming block, like it was intended. It’s going to be too small to read, formatted for this column, but you can click through to increase its size enough — however, I suggest you don’t. You should not have to do this much reading on an infographic, or at the very least it should be legible at a level in which you can take in most of the graphic. That you can’t read it is a failure on the designer’s part, not on this column’s formatting restrictions. Now … take it in.
Okay, now based on what you see here, without clicking through to read closely and taking fifteen minutes to do so, can you tell me what this is about? If you can, you are a much better person than I. All I got out of this first glance was that inflation is the sun and deflation is a black hole. Seems bad.
Aha! Here is a key that is to help us interpret what we are seeing:
The top is the European Central Bank, which is a lever. One lever, 17 countries.
From the ECB comes negative and positive deposit growth, represented as red and green lines respectively. These lines go to planets, which are countries. At this point, I’m struck with how bizarre a decision it is to visualize places as different place, just more difficult to comprehend. Why does a country have to be a planet? Can’t it be a country? What then is the ECB? Is it an alien? Why is it pushing planets between a black hole and the sun? This might actually make a really good science fiction book. Let’s continue.
The planets are sized to represent GDP. Their distance from the sun represents “deviation of aggregated monetary financial institutions’ assets from the Eurosystem’s Assets [Logarithmic Scale]” You would think it would be “ distance from inflation” because the sun is inflation, but I suppose this will do and who uses infographics to make things more simple anyway?
Having read the key and looking over the graphic, we should be done at this point. We should have all the information we need. There are about 1000 words on this infographic that suggest otherwise. Thankfully, they are tastefully displayed … all over every inch of this graphic.
But wait, not all the text is informative. We also get little gems like this:
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