Guest post by Payman Taei.
A picture truly tells a thousand words. From pie charts to cartograms, infographics have been around since the first humans learned to scratch symbols into the dirt. After all, an infographic is composed of only three vital elements: visual, content and knowledge—qualities shared by the earliest of cave drawings and the most technical of modern computer-aided data visualization.
Today, online infographic creation tools such as Visme allow anyone to easily create professional infographics. But this visual format is not new; instead, they are among the oldest forms of communication, and it only makes sense that they’ve retained their function throughout human history—people are visually wired.
An astonishing 50 percent of the human brain is involved with visual processing, and 70 percent of its sensory receptors are in the eyes. It takes less than one-tenth of one second for a person to take in new visual scene: 150 milliseconds to process a viewed symbol, and another 100 milliseconds to attach meaning to it.