Report on the conference in St. Petersburg

As usual, after the event, comes the need to relax, but we brought everything together and here is our report.

In the end, everything that was planned, we completed. Thanks to Fyodor Shumilov and Olga Privalova for the support by St. Petersburg State University, Department of Journalism, when the conference was held, and SND Russia.

All professionals who are engaged to infographics professionally gathered together and shared their experiences and reflection on the topic. RIA Novosti, Parovoz, the newspaper My Location, Action, Journal of Infographics, Firms’ Secret (though unable to attend personally, its work was presented on the exhibition), and, of course, Infographer.

Two Spanish guests visited us with their performance that exceeded all expectations. Javier Herrera as «the wedding of General» opened the first Russian conference. He spoke about the history of Malofey contest and reminded that next year’s contest will be held for the second time. Javier has promised that next year will be something special — celebration of the anniversary in style — so it is strongly recommended to attend.

Pablo Ramirez was our star of the second day. For his arrival we prepared in particular — brought to St. Petersburg whole trunk full of cards from construction paper (200 people * 15 cards = about 7 kg), in which participants were drawing according to Pablo’s assignments. This way we practiced the skills of visual thinking — we drew homes, televisions, design, business, marketing and ourselves in robots.

Pablo’s presentation was very warm and personalized — lots of images, his daughter’s, Gabriella, drawings. Such atmosphere is favorable to creativity.

We should also mention Infographics magazine, which is discussing about its plans for universal expansion.

Few random memorable moments:

Alexey Novichkov: «Infographics should not be easy to understand». He showed us a very interesting case with the map of fallen meteorites. First one seem incomprehensible, but it has the beauty and dynamics (link) and has the largest number of «likes» on Flickr and other sources. The second is understandable, but unfortunately boring, so people pass by, the second link.

And once again we heard from Alexey: visualization and infographics lets the person see what you can not see by just looking at it. Everything that is intangible — processes, evolution and structure of organizations. Material, but hidden from the eye — anatomy, the structure of the crystal. And infinitely large, which can not be caught with an eye at once — the continents and maps of the world, the structure of the galaxy. That’s the philosophy.

Dmitry Surnin gave few excellent examples of what infographics is not. Most laughed at the pseudo-infographic-type «pisya is somewhere nearby, where on a person or on an object there are location indications of the body. To such false infographics also applies «states the kettle» — about this phenomenon, see Dmitriy’s website.

Pablo showed visualization of Shakira’s concert,

and then Tatyana Misyutina complemented by showing a similar work on St. Petersburg’s Scarlet Sails.

А когда двухдневный спектакль закончился, и все поехали по домам, пришло понимание того факта, что первую конференцию организовать было не сложно. Вторую конференцию нам сделать уже гораздо сложнее – у каждого из нас много звездных работ не появится: боевой корабль РИА НОВОСТИ снова смотреть будет уже неинтересно, Новичков будет горд тремя новыми работами, мы сделаем некоторое количество свежих годовых отчетов, но нам всем будет очень сложно рассказать нечто принципиально новое. Поэтому, важно будет обойтись без повторения и искать новых спикеров, а их в нашей маленькой профессиональной сфере мало. Отдельные надежды возлагаем на факультет журналистики МГУ, где под руководством Славы Некляева развивается направление инфографики.

And when the two-day show ended and everyone went home, we realized that it was not too difficult to organize the first conference. But it will be harder to organize the second conference, taking in consideration that each of us will not have as much stellar work: Warship RIA News willl not be as interesting to look at once again, Novichkov will proudly present three new works, we will make a number of annual reports, but for all it will be very difficult to tell something fundamentally new. Therefore, it is important to not repeat ourselves again, and to look for new speakers, but unfortunately in our small professional field the number of these individuals is quite little. Private hopes on the Faculty of Journalism, where, under the leadership of Slava Neklyaev who is developing infographics there.

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