If we are not willing to create content beyond what is conventional, we will end up killing journalism. Creativity is a journey of suffering, of infinite frustrations, of insecure joy.
Most people today assume a certain level of subjectivity in journalistic articles or other written texts. And yet, people put a different kind of trust in infographics: they expect infographics to deliver hard facts, i.e., well-researched, reliable information.
With the loss of upward social mobility, many people feel that their way of life, job security, pensions, medical care, and children’s futures are in danger.
In many respects, information on these people, a.k.a. the “losers of globalization,” is not representative of their actual situation. Unemployment statistics are a prime example. While they do not qualify as fake news, they are based on very strict definitions of unemployment and do not reflect the drastic increase in underemployment or “felt unemployment” in the last decade.
Individual experiences and fears are more powerful than reported facts, making it easier for people to see prejudices or unsubstantiated rumors as the truth.
Simplicity is the key. It is essential that a graphic can be understood very quickly. If not, I consider the graphic a failure.
While Baptista’s graphics are very difficult to execute, they are very easy to comprehend.
His graphics always start with sketches by hand in which he creates the scene and puts everything in its place, focusing on composition and hierarchies. From this sketch, he creates model replicas. Once the models have been constructed, he photographs them from every possible angle until he finds the best perspective, and then, using Photoshop, he adds textures and details to the image. The lighting is crucial. He draws inspiration from the greatest painters in the history of art to achieve strong contrasts in light.
For Baptista, the job of the infographer is to make it easy to understand complex information. “The internet accumulates tons of data: you can find anything there. But there is so much noise amid the information and it is not easy to find reliable data. Reality is messy. The reader is unable to digest that much information; it just isn’t possible. The average readers of NatGeo takes between 1 to 3 minutes to look at an animated graphic. Videos longer than 1 minute are rarely watched to the end.