ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the reasons for the ongoing popularity of infographics as a public relations (PR) tool, questioning their use and usefulness in practice to understand whether a need will continue to exist for such visual representations of data in the future. Arguably the most significant influence on contemporary infographics, ‘Iso-type’ – the International System of Typographic Picture Education – was initially developed in 1925 by the Austrian philosopher, political economist. The use of infographics for pharmaceutical PR coincides broadly with the rise of social media and the ‘visual web’. As pharmaceutical PR flourished throughout the 80s, so did the graphical display of information, precipitated in part by the contributions of Edward Tufte to public interest in data visualisation with the publication of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1983. Isotype used signs and symbols as a pictorial representation for the infographic and while graphically successful, this oversimplification can sometimes lead to a loss of detail.
