When I was perusing some of my favorite blogs this morning I came across these two videos which artfully use visualization to explain a complex economic problem, the 2008-2009 credit crisis.
The cartoon probably doesn't address some of the important nuances of the crisis, but it succeeds where most of the major newspapers and opinion pages have failed: it explains a complex economic problem in a way that is fun and easy for the masses to understand.
This is why "a picture is worth a thousand words." Most people think visually – when we’re given a piece of information our brain attempts to understand it by visualizing it. This is why analogies are so popular – we describe a massive decrease in the index of a stock market as a “crash” because a crash is something that our brain can visualize into something more understandable. So how come more people don't try to communicate using visuals like these cartoons?
Because communicating visually used to be hard - it used to require that you have some sort of artistic talent, but no longer. That's no longer true with products like SmartDraw, which have automated just about any drawing that the average businessperson might need. So why not learn how to communicate visually and become a effective communicator, like the author of these cartoons?
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