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John Brennan

Along with an eye-catching visual appeal and an easy-to-grasp presentation of key information, Pablo Galeano and Francesco Maria Furno bring something extra to the infographics they create.
For the pair, co-founders of relajaelcoco, a Madrid-based graphic design studio, their work gives them the opportunity to exercise more than just their technical skills.
“It has a logical part, about structure and composition, but there is also an emotional part, with the drawings and the illustrations,” explains Furno. “We want to feed both parts of the brain.
“Our infographics are always colourful and full of small characters and elements because this represents the way we live life. We are happy people and we work in a happy way and we want to express that in each project.”
This combination of joie de vivre and professionalism has ensured their work and found a market, not only in their native Spain, but internationally as well, for publications and organisations such as WiredUK magazine and the BBC in Britain, and Entertainment Weekly in the US.
Galeano and Furno, who met and began working together while studying graphic design at IED in Barcelona, are clear on the reasons behind the growing popularity of the form they work in.
“We think an infographic is the best way to represent information because the brain works by initially recognising images not words,” says Furno. “Your brain immediately identifies the essential information in the big picture – whereas it has to process words or a phrase first.”
Part of the programme they followed at IED examined the way the human mind handles images, such as those in a poster or a doublepage spread in a magazine.
“We looked at the way people react in front of shapes,” Galeano explains. “During our three-year course we did both theoretical and practical exercises, so it was, and is, a learning-by-doing process.”
As with so much of their commercial work, the workshop Galeano and Furno ran at the Hong Kong Design Centre’s Knowledge of Design Week managed to deliver a serious message in a fun way, ensuring the experience had real impact.
The 22 participants included both graphic designers and representatives of companies likely to use infographics. Furno first took them through the considerations involved when transforming brand data into a simple infographic structure.
He explained how, after analysing the data, brainstorming ideas and sketching ways of representing it, a designer needs to settle on a structure for the information hierarchies, decide on the best way to utilise the brand’s colour palette, as well as choose the shapes to use within the design – given that regular shapes have more impact.
The participants then paired up to produce an infographic based on specific sets of data from research conducted by Spanish banking group BBVA into the popularity of various social media platforms and online businesses, along with some figures around “cyberworking”.
With only two-and-a-half hours to complete the task, Furno’s main advice was to keep it simple, as “there’s no time to create the Sistine Chapel”.
“Finding the right visual metaphor is the most important and difficult part of the process because you have to decide exactly how you are going to represent data and information in a graphic way,” he adds.
As the teams worked on their concepts, Furno and Galeano went from desk to desk offering help and advice.
Critiquing the completed infographics, Galeano said he was impressed with what had been created in such a short period of time and how some pairs had come up with particularly eloquent solutions.
Casting an eye over his industry in general, Furno believes that now is a great time to be a graphic designer. “The technology is improving, the environment is improving and the cultural level of the user is improving too. Also, there are a lot of companies who need to improve their brands.”
In the last six months, relajaelcoco has been working on a virtual reality project, for which the partners’ infographic skills have been a perfect fit.
“Visual data is the most important part of virtual reality as you need to spread a lot of user information inside that medium,” Furno points out.
“And the visual principles are the same whether you are working for a magazine, or in a virtual reality environment, or whatever,” Galeano adds. “What is changing is the user experience – you just have to know what kind of environment they are in and how much time they have.”
Furno sums up those fundamental visual principles of an infographic. “The idea is that you have a big picture that calls to people and says ‘Hey, look at me!’ But then you also have a few steps, a few levels, that they can decide to read or not, depending on whether they are interested or have the time.”

The Power of Infographics. "People are stopping to grow up. They are starting to become children again." #KODW2015 pic.twitter.com/j1YDaq4XxY
— Charmaine So (@charmso) June 11, 2015



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Joy and beauty colour the message of infographics

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Along with an eye-catching visual appeal and an easy-to-grasp presentation of key information, Pablo Galeano and Francesco Maria Furno bring something extra to the infographics they create.


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