Infographic animation production

An infographic animation is not a chart that moves

Movement only adds something at three moments: when something grows, when something shifts, or when one thing causes another. If a figure stands still, a static infographic is stronger. You read it at your own pace, you can look back at it and you can drop it straight into a report.

Even so, we are often asked to animate an existing infographic. Bars that grow upwards, numbers that count up, icons that fly in. It looks busy and tells you nothing extra. Worse still: the viewer has to wait for information they could have seen at a glance.

At Rijkswaterstaat you can see the difference. The brief was two static infographics on Verkeersbeeld op Zee, the maritime traffic picture. But the story was a chain: first the infrastructure on the North Sea, then the connections, then the sensors, and only then usable information. You only see that relationship when the parts appear in that order. So we made panels that build up to the rhythm of the speaker. What is already there stays still. Only the new step moves.

That is why we don't start with the question of how something should move, but with the question of what changes. Sometimes the answer is: nothing. Then we recommend a static infographic, and we make it just as carefully.