Big fun at the day job today, where I was working with the metal stamping companies again. I know — sounds thrilling, right? But in this case it was actually pretty interesting, since we’re putting together a cool infographic about the metal stamping industry, including a focus on stainless steel stamping companies specifically.
The basic idea of the infographic is that you present a whole bunch of factoids in an interesting and graphical way. These factoids are supposed to be the kind of thing that people find interesting and make them go “hmm.” For example, with the metal stamping industry one of the things I learned while researching was that it ships about 11 billion dollars of product domestically. By itself this is a big but not terribly interesting fact about stainless steel metal stamping. But we can then compare that number against other well-known industries. Specifically we can look at the music industry at 4.4 billion, or the movie industry at 8 billion — next to those you’re suddenly surprised at how huge this metal stamping thing is and how you’ve never heard of it (all that info comes from the census bureau by the way, from their 2007 update).
This is of course just one little factoid that’s going on the infographic. As you can imagine the goal of the metal stamping industry infographic is to inform about the industry and about stainless steel stamping, and not to promote a particular viewpoint or to persuade (which is another common use of infographics — sadly those ones are usually filled with pretty biased, misleading and even outright incorrect facts).
I like working on these kinds of projects, which are far more interesting than press releases and updating copy and sell sheets. It’s fun putting projects like this together, and then work on how to promote them.
