It’s finally here. We’re happy to say that Visage has officially launched.
Visage is now open to everyone, and we appreciate your help in making a product you love using every day. We’ll continue building and shipping good things your way every two weeks (and, sometimes, more often than that). We drink a lot of our own Kool-Aid here and legitimately love using our own product to create visual content, whether it’s helping a customer display data or just getting weird in our own Slack channels.
We’ve launched with a simple goal: to help you market your brand by telling powerful stories with your data. You don’t need to be a data scientist or designer to do this; Visage does it for you.
With Visage, we’re giving you a simple platform to create beautiful, effective visual content for brand publishing. This is an educational journey, and we know you will learn a set of skills that makes you a force for creative good.
In the interest of making Visage feel like fun rather than work, start simple.
First, make some quick text graphics to build your confidence and get familiar with the Visage platform.
I’m a fan of finding vintage tech or retrofuture images, uploading in the image section of the side drawer, and placing our brand colors as an overlay with reduced opacity (which you can access by clicking the pencil icon on the image thumbnail). Play with the typography by just writing something weird and adjusting line height, letter spacing, font types and sizes. (It’s exercising the visual content muscles for prime time, like writing this blog post.) You can do this in no time and start quoting famous and inspiring people:
Next, use your own visual language and set your team up for success by uploading your brand assets, including fonts, colors, images and logos, to ensure every piece you create is consistent and accurately reflects your brand identity. Are you too busy to do this? Let us help you! Send over brand guidelines and supporting assets to support@visage.co — we are serious when we say we will be happy to help.
Now, get into some data if you’re ready to start adding more interesting context to your visual content. Again, we’ve started simple here in the core product, so if you’re looking to get wild with data analysis, there are better tools out there for you. If you’re a marketer and starting to find a lot of interesting data worth communicating to your audience, we’re here to turn you into a champion. Keep in mind, you can warm up to data storytelling in small doses, too. Make some garbage graphics that don’t matter to get a feel for this. No one will judge you. This is what Visage cofounder, Sean Parent, thinks:
Granted, we wouldn’t ever publish something bizarre like this externally on our blog in something as important as a launch announcement, because marketing has to be serious. It’s just a warmup. For those of you who are serious about serious things, we know how to get serious, too. Visage has been recently used by some of the most forward-thinking marketers to bring real data stories to life. Here are some of our favorite examples:
Requests for Startups (including their awesome Economy Workforce Survey)
Optimizely’s first Industry Benchmark Report
We’re always on hand to help you get the look, feel and story right. Ask us questions and share ideas by hitting the Intercom button (question mark icon at bottom right) when you sign into Visage (or sign up here). We would love to hear from you, whether it’s to offer your finest critique, strange ideas or even to request some high-level relationship advice.
Also, we know sometimes you just don’t have the time or resources to do things yourself, so we’re happy to take care of it for you. If you like the idea of publishing data stories but want someone to get the ball rolling for you, check out the Newsroom Creative managed service in partnership with Column Five, our sister company, and let experts create effective campaigns for your brand, producing beautiful work that reaches your audience.
Finally, with our ongoing education programs, we’re passing our knowledge on to you. We’re in our 4th year of teaching Visualization of Information at Columbia University, and we want to teach your team as well. Through our online resources, webinars (starting in July) and on-site trainings (which are being spearheaded by our cofounder/Chief Strategy Officer, Jake Burkett), we teach you data visualization best practices and give you tips to help you tell better stories. Check out our published e-books, and stay tuned for more.
Ready to go forth and create? Give Visage a try, and let us know what you think!
Comments