The site aims to be a repository for graphically organized information on the web, as well as a marketplace and community for publishers, designers, researchers and everyday web users.
Visual.ly contains three main components. First, it's a search engine for web-based infographics. Second, it's a silo of data from government agencies, non-profits and other research- and data-focused entities.
Third, Visual.ly is a web-based platform for creating infographics of your own -- no graphic design experience or software required.
Already, the site boasts a collection of 2,000 infographics in its indexed and searchable galleries, as well as 60,000 users who signed up for beta access.
Here's a demo of the site:
In a release, co-founder and CEO Stew Langille said, "We knew we were onto something big, having seen the power of data visualization work so dramatically across the Web."
The service's main infographic creation tool will launch in a few months.
Not only does the site aggregate and help you find great infographics, it also lets you make infographics of your own using various types of data. A demo of this capability can be seen right now with the Twitter Visualizer, a tool that lets you build and customize Twitter infographics.
Right now, you can use Visual.ly's Twitter tool to generate infographics based on yours and others' Twitter usage. For example, here's a visualization showing my tweet data compared to data from Tal Siach, a Visual.ly co-founder:
