We were thrilled to partner with the UK&#39;s Climate Change Committee (CCC) to bring their transformative Seventh Carbon Budget Report to life visually and dynamically, articulating the importance of their research and insights to a global audience.

The CCC&#39;s mission to communicate the complex data behind climate science demanded a bold, creative approach that was fresh, brand-driven, and unapologetically ambitious.
Working closely with the client&#39;s team, we designed and delivered a wide range of dynamic digital media assets, including an animated keynote video and vibrant animated social assets, to create awareness and amplify key messages and data points.

The CCC&#39;s research strikes a balance between authority and hope, highlighting the Seventh Carbon Budget&#39;s critical insights while offering an optimistic path toward a sustainable future.

The keynote animation helps bring this vision to life with stunning visuals to underpin an important narrative delivered by key stakeholders from across the organisation. Collaborating with a client as passionate as the Climate Change Committee was an absolute privilege. 

Together, we transformed complex climate science into an accessible, inspiring call to action for audiences worldwide. As their agency of choice, we look forward to working with them on many new, exciting and important initiatives.

Recognising the impacts of climate change is imperative to equipping us with the knowledge of how we can change for the better.

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The 7th Carbon Budget, a story told through video 

Infographics are far more than mere aesthetic constructs; executed well, they represent a sophisticated synthesis of art, science, and storytelling designed to illuminate and persuade in a visually saturated world.

<h3>The Essence of an Infographic</h3>

An infographic is a meticulously crafted visual representation that integrates text, imagery, charts, and graphical elements to convey information precisely and elegantly. They can transcend traditional data presentation by weaving a narrative that intuitively guides the viewer through a natural flow of information. Infographics are not merely tools for simplification; they are instruments of insight, rendering the abstract tangible and the complex comprehensible.

<h4>Cognitive Resonance</h4>

The human brain is inherently predisposed to process visual information with remarkable efficiency. Research indicates that approximately 65% of people are visual learners, and the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. Infographics capitalise on this predisposition by distilling multifaceted data into structured, visually coherent formats. By employing colour, shape, and spatial organisation, they facilitate rapid comprehension, enabling audiences to grasp intricate concepts without cognitive strain.

<h4>Engagement Through Aesthetic Appeal</h4>

In a digital landscape teeming with competing stimuli, capturing and retaining attention is a formidable challenge. Infographics address this by blending aesthetic allure with intellectual substance. Their vibrant designs and dynamic layouts are proven to draw viewers in, fostering sustained engagement. Unlike dense reports or static spreadsheets, infographics invite exploration, transforming passive consumption into an active dialogue with data.

<h4>Memory and Retention</h4>

The efficacy of infographics extends beyond immediate comprehension to long-term retention. Studies, such as those by the Visual Teaching Alliance, demonstrate that visual aids can enhance information retention by up to 400% compared to text alone. Infographics create enduring mental associations by anchoring data in striking visuals, ensuring that key insights linger in the viewer&#39;s memory.

<h3>Applications Across Domains</h3>

The versatility of infographics renders them indispensable across a spectrum of industries and contexts, each leveraging their unique capacity to inform and persuade.

Corporate Strategy and Communication: In boardrooms and business presentations, infographics distil financial reports, market analyses, and strategic plans into accessible visuals, enabling stakeholders to make informed decisions swiftly.

Marketing and Branding: Infographics are potent tools in marketing campaigns, transforming product features, consumer trends, or brand stories into shareable, visually striking assets that resonate with target audiences.

Education and Pedagogy: In classrooms and training programs, infographics simplify complex subjects, ranging from scientific processes to historical timelines, fostering a deeper understanding and increasing engagement levels.

Journalism and Media: Newsrooms utilise infographics to present data-driven stories, such as electoral results, economic trends, or public health statistics, in ways that captivate and inform diverse audiences.

Social Media and Digital Platforms: In the fast-paced realm of social media, infographics thrive as concise, shareable content that cuts through noise, amplifying reach and engagement.

Healthcare and Public Awareness: Medical professionals and public health organisations use infographics to communicate critical information, such as disease prevention strategies or treatment protocols, with clarity and empathy.

Non-Profit Advocacy: Non-profits leverage infographics to convey the urgency of their causes, translating statistics on poverty, climate change, or inequality into compelling calls to action.

<h3>The Craft of Creating Impactful Infographics</h3>

Crafting a compelling infographic demands a delicate balance of creativity, technical precision, and audience awareness. Key principles include:

Clarity and Focus: An infographic should prioritise a single, well-defined message, avoiding clutter or extraneous details that dilute the impact.

Visual Hierarchy: Strategic use of size, colour, and layout guides the viewer&#39;s eye, ensuring a logical flow of information.

Data Integrity: Accuracy is paramount; visualisations must faithfully represent the underlying data without distortion or manipulation.

Aesthetic Cohesion: A harmonious design that aligns with a brand identity or thematic context enhances credibility and appeal.

Audience-Centric Design: Understanding the target audience&#39;s needs, preferences, and literacy level ensures the infographic resonates and informs effectively.

<h3>The Future of Infographics</h3>

As technology evolves, so too does the potential of infographics. Interactive infographics enable users to explore data dynamically, tailoring their experience to specific interests. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) promise immersive data experiences, while artificial intelligence (AI) offers tools to automate and personalise infographic creation at scale. However, regardless of medium, the core strength of infographics lies in their ability to humanise data, forging connections between information and understanding.

To learn more about how Soak can support all of your infographics requirements, email us at info@soak.co.uk. We&#39;d love to hear your ideas!

In an era of information overload, the challenge of distilling complex data into accessible, engaging, and memorable insights has never been more relevant. Amidst this deluge of information, infographics can serve as a beacon of clarity, transforming data into compelling visual narratives that people can easily understand.

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Visualising Knowledge: The Art and Science of Infographics

Solutions that endure and excel determine and address user needs before they crystallise into explicit demands. Digital Darwinism is a concept popularised by Brian Solis and Tom Goodwin. It refers to the idea that businesses must rapidly adapt to technological and societal changes in the digital age to thrive.

At Soak, we use this concept to drive a disciplined, forward-looking approach that defines how we conceive, evaluate, and refine our digital endeavours. It is not merely a strategy but an explicit commitment to ensure we stay ahead of the curve.

<h2>The Rising Tide of User Expectations</h2>

Modern audiences inhabit a world where technology is not simply a tool but an extension of their daily lives. From algorithms curating bespoke content to interfaces that subtly recalibrate based on individual preferences, the threshold for a sophisticated, seamless experience has risen rapidly. Users expect immediacy, coherence, and understated elegance when using any application, platform, or transactional system. However, these expectations often remain latent - users won&#39;t articulate their desire for a streamlined workflow or an uncluttered aesthetic until they encounter its absence, at which point disengagement is swift and often irrevocable.

The practice of amassing functionality with the promise of subsequent refinement is akin to a species banking on brute strength while ignoring an encroaching ice age. By the time criticisms surface, the project&#39;s momentum may be irretrievably lost, with resources depleted, goodwill eroded, and the team relegated to a cycle of remediation.

The concept of Digital Darwinism offers a corrective: it champions proactive evolution over belated reaction, embedding this ethos in the nascent stages of a project when flexibility is at its peak and unfounded assumptions are least costly.

<h2>A Refined Instrument of Insight</h2>

One of the tools in our armoury is optimised benchmarking, a precise and methodical process that balances speed and insight while intensely focusing on the core user experience. It is relatively lightweight and helps us refine the interface and interactions by assessing the response time, clarity of navigation, and effectiveness of key tasks. When structured correctly, this process provides valuable insights quickly, often within just a few days.

Consider an emerging digital platform in its formative stages. Through careful testing, we can determine how long it takes to execute a key function, identify where users might hesitate, and assess how the interface performs under moderate demand.
This approach does not aim for exhaustive mastery but follows a measured path, maintaining intellectual and operational flexibility, allowing us to improve the user experience before making deeper structural commitments. The process provides a valuable lens into the core preferences that will shape the project&#39;s future.

<h2>Driving Digital Sophistication</h2>

Optimised benchmarking combined with a fluid design process extends way beyond present utility and helps us understand and map what lies ahead. The signs of progress are unmistakable: artificial intelligence now tailors interactions with remarkable accuracy, voice and gesture controls are replacing traditional inputs, and inclusivity is emerging as a core UX principle. The digital experiences of tomorrow will offer predictive prompts drawn from a prior engagement, interfaces that adapt seamlessly across devices, and auditory commands that render content as optional. These are not fanciful conjectures but imminent realities.

In a recent exercise, we modelled a system that adjusted its presentation based on user patterns, prioritising frequently visited elements while downplaying extraneous ones. As a result, we observed a measurable increase in dwell time. This was achieved not through dramatic innovation but by proactively recalibrating the user experience. These advancements highlight an important truth - the future of digital success lies in being anticipatory and sophisticated, meeting users where they will be rather than just where they are.

<h2>A Custodian of Foresight</h2>

Our clients seek both execution and enlightenment. As a digital and data design agency, we are responsible for building and illuminating, discovering the unseen and exploring the uncharted. It&#39;s not good business for user dissatisfaction to signal a flaw; instead, we identify and address issues proactively, ensuring sustained relevance. This distinction sets each new project apart from one already dominating its domain.

Very few users will analyse the underlying architecture or the development timeline; they focus on the quality of their experience. A digital journey that anticipates their instincts reduces their effort and evolves alongside their needs, moving beyond mere utility to become essential and expected. In an era where user loyalty is the most valuable currency, adaptability is not just an option but a necessity.

Disruption can come from many sources, such as competitors, technological changes, or shifts in user behaviour. The real question isn&#39;t if these forces will emerge but whether your digital project will be ready for them. At Soak, we see firsthand how valuable early, user-focused insights can be in transforming new ideas into lasting successes.

In the realm of digital innovation, longevity is not a gift bestowed upon the most robustly engineered or extravagantly funded; it is primarily earned through adaptability.

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Digital Darwinism: The Importance of Anticipatory Design Solutions

Royal Society

World Wide Fund for Nature

Totaljobs

The World Bank

The London School of Economics and Political Science

The Economist

The Adecco Group

Swiss Re

Queen Mary University of London

HSBC

Harvard University

GoStudent

Games Workshop

AmDocs

Selected work

We designed fully responsive prototypes that evolved through several iterations, resulting in a flexible, modular interface that could accommodate the large number of activities on offer and the unique requirements of each venue. 

Complex, multi-tenant applications must be technically robust and adaptable to the ongoing requirements of the business. The underlying architecture was carefully considered to dovetail with Gravity&#39;s IT infrastructure and numerous 3rd party software solutions.

Gravity

Gravity are an international active entertainment brand offering immersive gaming, e-karting, trampolining and climbing activities across 20+ sites, including the UK, Germany and Saudi Arabia.

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The power of play

Central to our design is an interactive landscape that familiarises users with the interconnected facets of industrial decarbonization. This includes areas like green energy generation, manufacturing industries, the national grid, ports, transportation, and the environment.

The tool features three interactive pathways tailored to different audience needs. These include a public engagement tool to build understanding of the net zero pathways and the impact of decarbonisation, a learning tool to guide school leavers toward potential training routes for a career in decarbonisation and for policy-makers to view relevant research findings.

IDRIC

In collaboration with IDRIC (the Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre), we designed and developed an immersive visualisation tool that allows users to explore what a green industrial future looks like.

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Visualising industrial decarbonisation

The interactive tool was seamlessly integrated into GoStudent&#39;s existing website infrastructure and needed to consider several crucial requirements from a UX and technology perspective, including the approach for multiple languages.

The tool carries a considerable volume of data that powers all the indices, country profiles, survey results and analysis. A wide variety of data views meant developing a data structure that ensured optimal speed and accessibility for the end-user. An innovative client-side rendering mechanism was used to achieve a fast and efficient experience.

GoStudent, the #1 rated global tutoring school, conducted a survey spanning seven countries that gained deep insight into education trends from both parent and student perspectives.

Our brief was to work with the static survey data, indices data, and a written report to create an engaging, intuitive, informative, and easy-to-understand interactive experience delivered in an ambitious timescale.

Selected Work - GoStudent

European education survey

The data index and campaign featured in several global publications, including the New York Times and underpins a key report that kicks off Swiss Re&#39;s Climate Resilience Campaign for 2021, leading to the COP26 UN climate change conference later this year.

Shortly after being appointed Swiss Re&#39;s global data design partner, the team asked us to design and develop a new, data-driven experience and a suite of campaign assets that helped raise awareness of the global economic impact of climate change.

Selected Work - Swiss Re

The economics of climate change

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We help businesses and organisations unlock the true value of digital and data.

Digital & Data Design Agency

Latest Project - Swiss Re - Background

Latest Project - Swiss Re - Foreground

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We help businesses and organisations unlock the true value of Digital and Data.

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The world bank

Human capital animation

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Closing the protection gap

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Insurance Information Institute

Dynamic economics dashboard

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Digital toolkit

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Queen mary university london

Research highways

<ol><li>Data strategy</li><li>Data analysis</li><li>Infographics</li><li>Data storytelling</li><li>Dashboards</li><li>Corporate reports</li><li>Interactive Indices / indexes</li><li>Dynamic data tools</li></ol>

<a href="https://soak.co.uk/what-we-do#data-visualisation">Find out more about our data vis services</a>

Data visualisation 

<ol><li>Digital strategy</li><li>Discovery &amp; planning</li><li>UX &amp; prototyping</li><li>Conceptualisation &amp; design</li><li>Branding</li><li>Development &amp; build</li><li>Integration</li><li>Content Management</li></ol>

<a href="https://soak.co.uk/what-we-do#ux-design--development">Find out more about our UX and design services</a>

UX, design & development

<ol><li>Strategy &amp; planning</li><li>Ideation &amp; conceptualisation</li><li>Custom illustration</li><li>Copywriting</li><li>Asset production</li><li>Internal comms</li></ol>

<a href="https://soak.co.uk/what-we-do#campaign--communications">Find out more about our campaign services</a>

Campaign & communications

<ol><li>Conceptualisation</li><li>Illustration</li><li>Storyboarding</li><li>Narrative development</li><li>Animation</li><li>Post-production</li></ol>

<a href="https://soak.co.uk/what-we-do#animation--video">Find out more about our animation services</a>

Animation & video

Our award-winning digital solutions span the simple to the complex. We&#39;re Creative, UX and Data specialists, always user-focused and not restricted by any one single platform or technology.

What we do

The summit was in response to close engagements with governments across Sub-Saharan Africa on the need to highlight the vital role of human capital in economic growth. It was also the first Human Capital Summit at a Heads of States level in Africa. 

Sub-Saharan Africa entered the last decade with significant deficits in human capital (the knowledge, skills, and health that people accumulate over their lives). The region’s average Human Capital Index (HCI) was the lowest across all the world’s regions, with a significant proportion of African countries at the bottom of the HCI.

The animation, ahead of the keynote speaker, was played at the start of the final day and uses a narrative centred around three core themes: Economic Growth, Resilient Systems and Social Cohesion. 

Data visualisation and storytelling are used throughout the sequence to emphasise and clarify important facts and figures that would resonate with the audience of Heads of State, Leaders, and Policymakers. In a first of its kind data-based and policy integrated storytelling, the innovative approach was very well received by online and in-person viewers.

The World Bank asked us to produce a data-driven animation for The Africa Human Capital Heads of State Summit held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the 25th - 26th of July 2023.

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The financial burden of such events is enormous, but despite this threat, many people and businesses remain uninsured, leaving them vulnerable when a natural catastrophe strikes.

Swiss RE asked us to develop an interactive data tool illustrating the protection gap and losses from various natural disasters across five continents and twelve countries.

The interface centres around a stylised (mapbox) 3D globe. Clicking on regions and countries reveals the protection gap and total economic losses over the last ten years with the option to deep-dive into more in-depth analysis.

The fully integrated tool is a perfect example of how information can be more accessible, understandable and interesting using interactive data visualisation and information design.

Catastrophes such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and winter storms have become more intense and frequent, threatening people and economies worldwide.

Digital & Data Design Agency

We help businesses and organisations unlock the true value of Digital and Data.

Selected work

The power of play

European education survey

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

The economics of climate change

The power of play

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

European education survey

The economics of climate change

/ Our Clients

/ News and insights

The 7th Carbon Budget, a story told through video

Visualising Knowledge: The Art and Science of Infographics

Digital Darwinism: The Importance of Anticipatory Design Solutions

Human capital animation

Closing the protection gap

Dynamic economics dashboard

Digital toolkit

Research highways

Digital & Data Design Agency

We help businesses and organisations unlock the true value of Digital and Data.

Selected work

The power of play

European education survey

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

The economics of climate change

The power of play

Visualising industrial decarbonisation

European education survey

The economics of climate change

/ Our Clients

/ News and insights

The 7th Carbon Budget, a story told through video

Visualising Knowledge: The Art and Science of Infographics

Digital Darwinism: The Importance of Anticipatory Design Solutions

Human capital animation

Closing the protection gap

Dynamic economics dashboard

Digital toolkit

Research highways

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