It's enjoyable to just drink in an image. It's effortless. That struck me as an interesting way of looking at it: I do all the grunt work so you can enjoy.

I'm doing a lot of cognitive processing. I'm gathering research. I'm processing it. I'm arranging the data. I'm sorting out the narrative. I'm designing. It's almost as if I do all the cognitive work that you then don't have to do. I digest it, process it, and then offer something that's very easy for you to digest.

Sometimes the data has a sense of a structure within it, especially if I'm looking at networks or relationships, which generally lend themselves to a certain style.

The classic one for me is one of my favorite images - left-versus-right political-spectrum image. I was trying to visualize the concepts on the political spectrum. I'm left-leaning, and I discovered as I was doing it that I had an impulse to make the left-hand side appear better than the right-hand side. That was manifesting in the way I was choosing certain words, framing certain ideas. I shared it with a few people, and they all said, "Oh my God, this is really biased." I hadn't seen it at all.

Design has a powerful impact on the viewer. It has authority, and data also has the same air of authenticity and detail. It can be hard to argue with a graph, and it's hard to argue with data. So to combine data with a strong visual impact creates a powerful message.

Often I forget that design is really about removing things: optimizing the flow of information, the display, so there are the fewest elements possible, but still they preserve the essence of the subject.

I'm happy to provide that service. But that's the power of it. A good infographic that's been really worked on looks simple and easy, but it actually required a lot of processing.