The whiz kids behind Mint’s infographics, Stewart Langille and Lee Sherman are today launching the first startup that solely focuses on mass producing infographics, Visually. Users who visit Visually this morning can see over 2000 infographics uploaded by designers like Jess3 and Dave McCandless as well as upload their own in a myriad of topics ranging from Science to Sports to the Economy.
In its first launch iteration, Visually has partnered up with The Atlantic, GOOD Magazine CNNMoney.com, Ebay, The National Geographic and others to provide infographics content in exchange for sharing links — On Visually each participating publication gets to upload its own graphics, which are embedded and shared using an code generated by Visually.
Visually plans on monetizing eventually by letting publications subscribe to its offerings via a monthly fee. “Everyone needs to create a graph or a chart or something, and the software that’s currently out there is more focused on business intelligence” Langille says. “There is a definite need to create simple visualizations for people. Within three clicks you can create visualizations for the sites.”
Langille hopes with Visually to create a community of designers a la Dribbble or Forrst, but also hopes to rope in infographic producers that are concerned with issues like exposure and monetization. If and when the basic infographics part of the site includes advertising he wants to incorporate artist friendly business practices like revenue sharing.
In addition to letting people upload and download infographics today, Visually has created a Twitterize Yourself widget that allows Twitter users to compare themselves against celebrities like Lady Gaga and Michael Arrington and create an infographic out of the experience. While there isn’t much practical benefit from this, it is pretty delightful.
This automated process is a harbinger of Visually product developments to come, as eventually Langile is about to introduce an interface where customers will be to be able to enter in data and have the visuals come out, with the choices of various artist’s styles baked in to the service.
The duo have almost 500K in seed funding to make this dream come true. Langille tells me, “It’s already the largest collection of infographics on the web.” Nice.
