When “infographics” jump the shark

Mashable offers an “infographic” describing Google’s history in social networking. And it’s pretty and all well and good, except that the graphic adds no information.

Rather, it’s simply a set of data points that happen to have been put into an image. It’s as if Illustrator had an “Import from Excel” function.

Infographics are supposed to add information, by giving you a visual or intuitive sense of, say, proportion or relationships or trends. This one does none of that. What we have here is not design, but decoration.