For everyone who is interested in information design we prepared the events calendar. We found over 44 conferences and workshops, dedicated to infographics and visualization topic all over the world.
The idea to make this kind of ‘map-calendar’ of events appeared in our mind a long time ago, we started to collect data in 2011 and suddenly 2012 started. So we decided to combine both years and show the history for 2011 and actual events for 2012, which you can use for your personal planning.
November, December and January are the months without infographic activities — second year proves this tendency. But in the rest periods there are up to 4 events, which you can visit. In 2012 the most active months are Feb, March and June — you even will have no time to repack your luggage.
The most ‘infographic’ regions are Europe and USA.
Book your tickets, learn and make connections! And we will prepare an interactive version.
You can download The Calendar in PDF it allows to click on the conference name and go directly to conference website. We plan to update this calendar regularly and track all news. If you know about interesting event which will happen this year, please, email to us!
For those, who is interested in process of creation, we put below all stages of calendar creation. We were trying different ways to show timeline together with geographical location of the conference.
Starting fro the simple table in Excel, we did b&w sketch to see, how data will work on paper. The first skeleton looked like that:
Initially we wanted to divide workshops (on the bottom) and conferences (on the top). The first design attempt was done by Jane Gertz – she decided to stylize it as am geographical atlas and it was quite funny, but requited pastel colors and hardly readable on the screen fonts.
We liked this idea, but generally it looked not memorable enough and text turned accordingly to the destinations was quite unreadable. We started working on it and Evgeny Smolyak made another version, his first draft is:
It made texts more comprehensive , at least they all were put horizontally, still we were not satisfied and wanted more passion!
In the end we delivered calendar, which you can see in the beginning – world map in the middle, timeline rounds the map, black background, different color is dedicated to each month, 2012 is brighter than 2011.