Infographics platform Visual.ly has launched new community features that allow users to more closely follow infographics from their favourite designer, data journalist, topic or news outlet.

“We are taking Visual.ly from a place where it was really easy to share infographics to a place where people can engage and interact with each other around infographics,” Lee Sherman, co-founder and chief content officer told Journalism.co.uk.

Collaboration

Since launching in Beta in 2011, Visual.ly has signed up over 32,000 designers with a couple million users returning each month to explore and share infographics. Visual.ly’s new expansion of social tools looks to streamline collaboration between designers and those looking to commission infographics in what Sherman describes as a “social network for infographics and data visualisations”.

“To make an infographic requires a multidisciplinary team. You need data analysts, journalists, researchers, designers. It's hard to put those teams together unless you are the Guardian or the New York Times or a big news organisation. We are trying to make it easier to put those teams together.”

Social Features

In the biggest update since launch, Visual.ly’s new social capacity will include an activity feed, options for direct messaging around a project, and notifications sent via email for comments, project availability and updates from the designers users follow. Collaboration is something Visual.ly CEO Stew Langille is anxious to nurture, especially given the newness of data visualization as an industry on its own.

“What’s really interesting is collaboration amongst the design community, but also across disciplines, and I’d like to see more of that. Marketers with designers; journalists with analysts. I’m interested in that cross-fix collaboration you don’t see a lot of,” Langille says.

“We’ve looked at one discipline connecting to each other, but the future’s going to cross industries.”

Marketplace

The community extension is only one step towards Visual.ly’s larger goal of opening up a marketplace where designers will be able to more easily facilitate collaboration and commissioned work. 

Creative talent will be able to connect with paying clients and find meaningful work, all while building their reputations through our online community.

Branded Graphics

These new updates will allow companies to share brand-associated infographics, potentially increasing their audience by connecting with follows of specific artists and journalists.

Where the capicity exists, some companies may also choose to start creating and sharing their own infographics using Visual.ly, adding an engaging, visual element to their current social media activity.