Whether you’ve got a big presentation or an important blog post to write, infographics will grab your reader’s attention and allow them to grasp the information succinctly and quickly. Infographics breathe life into an otherwise boring presentation of data. They can truly impact you, whether you want to grow your brand or convey a powerful message. In this guide, we’ll teach the secret to building beautiful and engaging infographics that grab attention and help information stick for better memory recall.
What is an Infographic?
Infographics are educational graphics that aim to simplify the complex information in an engaging and entertaining way. The goal of an infographic is to deliver small bite-sized information quickly and clearly. Often, they use multiple visual elements like charts, diagrams, tables, and texts to present complex information in an easy-to-understand format. Infographics deliver a quick overview of a topic, summarize a long report, display research, compare and contrast multiple options and raise awareness about an issue.
Types of Infographics
There are various ways to convey your message in a visual format. In this section, we’ll cover the different infographic style options so you know when to use each type.
#1. Visual Infographics
Visual infographics are focused on visual elements woven with a bit of text to tell a story and convey key information to the audience. For example, the visual infographic below uses visual cues accompanied by texts to explain how to be a great storyteller. They’re often based on cartoon graphics with text placed strategically to elaborate on the visual. The focus of the visual infographic is to tell a story rather than share data or statistical information.
#2. List-Based Infographics
List-based infographics contain visual and text elements in a list form. These infographics are perfect when you have a list of information you’d like to share. Such infographics are often attached to blog posts with icons instead of bullet points and have creative fonts and bright colors to make each item stand out.
#3. Map Infographics
Map infographics typically feature a map of a geographic region, such as the entire world, a country, or a particular city. Charts and graphs accompany these infographics to help explain the data shown on the map. The best way to explain location-based data is with a map infographic. They often contain heat maps, labels, and icons to highlight the data. It may also compare data between regions by placing multiple maps side-by-side.
#4. Timeline Infographics
Timeline infographics show a timeframe visually, explaining how events unfolded over a specific period. For example, your timeline infographic could tell the story of the evolution of your brand (or its products) or major events in the history of the internet. Here’s an example of a timeline infographic. These infographics are best used to depict a story where time is relevant. It’s a great way to make your story more compelling and convert plain text into easily digestible content.
#5. Step-by-Step Infographics
Step-by-step infographics provide a summary of steps within a process. It’s perfect when you are explaining how to do something. You can use diagrams, numbered icons, timelines, and flowcharts to guide readers through the series of steps. By creating a visual representation of the process, readers can easily follow along based on the steps.
Infographics Usage In Digital World
Infographics have been quickly gaining popularity over the years. Many businesses and organizations use infographics to convey powerful messaging and capture their audience’s attention. In the 21st century, there’s an overload of information available. Therefore, it’s important to capture attention and help readers understand your point quickly. Here’s why infographics are used in the digital world:
Easily capture the audience’s attention: Infographics help marketers share statistics, facts, and other graphic elements to catch their target audience’s attention and quickly share pertinent information. Help improve content virality: A well-put-together infographic can be extremely insightful, which causes other business owners, creators, and marketers to share the infographic with their audience. Makes complex ideas easy to understand: By using a combination of visuals and text, you can present information in a clear and concise manner. Boost brand awareness: Most infographics include a brand name, company logo, and web address so people can learn more about the business. Sharing an infographic can greatly increase brand awareness and draw traffic to your website. Explain how something works: Infographics can be used to simplify complex ideas and teach the mechanics behind how complicated concepts or objects work. For example, you can pull apart intricate products like iPhones and cameras and visually explain their core features. Raise awareness: Before selling customers a product, you might have to raise awareness about a problem. That means using a lot of data to shock the reader and get them to take action. Draw comparisons: You can compare and contrast products, brands, or strategies through infographics. Infographics can quickly highlight the similarities and differences, which could be otherwise confusing to express with words.
Process of Making An Infographic
Making an infographic doesn’t have to be difficult. Follow the steps outlined below to create an engaging and effective one.
Step 1: Outline Your Infographics’ Goals
Before you create an infographic, you have to know the purpose behind it. What story are you looking to tell? And who’s your target audience? Your infographic should aim to tell a story, explain a concept, share data, or change people’s opinions about a common misconception. Any goal determines the information you use, how you structure the infographic, and the graphics used. Your audience should be left with a specific takeaway from your infographic, which makes them want to share the content. Think about the questions your readers would ask about the topic, and aim to answer them through your infographic. The goal is to share only the most valuable information about the topic without boring your audience.
Step 2: Choose Your Topic
Every infographic should have a key topic or message that educates its readers or persuades them to agree with your message. For example, let’s say you want to convince universities to host more gym classes in their school. Your infographic would show statistics about obesity in University and how exercising regularly can make a positive difference. The right topic varies depending on your business or what you want to accomplish with your infographic. You can develop a topic by focusing on the audience’s problem. Aim to inform your audience about something that could help them solve their problem. For example, a fitness trainer might tell their audience about diet hacks or workout exercises to help beginners get started. When crafting your topic, make sure to lay out your message. What is the overarching message, and what are your key supporting points? From there, you can easily find the data and visual elements to help support your case.
Step 3: Collect Necessary Data
Most infographics include data to back up their messaging. This helps to make your case so that readers can grasp the importance of your message. In this step, you’ll want to collect all the pertinent data available about the concept and organize it in a logical manner. Decide how you’ll collect the data. For example, you can conduct your research, surveys, or round-up analytics from various data monitoring tools. However, you can also compile relevant data from credible resources such as government websites. When choosing the data sets, you want to manipulate the data objectively, so there aren’t any redundancies. Also, the data should be displayed sequentially to help fit the narrative you’re trying to convey.
Step 4: Visualize Your Data
Next, you’ll have to put those data in the right visualizations to help create a clear flow of information. These data should work together to tell your story. How you visually present the data depends on your audience and goals. Here are a few ways you can decide to organize your data sets visually:
Use maps to show how data can differ by location Use a line chart or timeline to show how trends have changed Leverage flowcharts, Venn diagrams, tables, and lists help readers better understand how data is connected and divided Use bold texts, colorful icons, and bright colors to help your message stand out
Step 5: Design Your Graphics
Now that you’ve organized your content and know the placement, it’s time to design or pick out the appropriate graphics to piece your infographic together. Infographics can include a variety of graphic elements, such as:
Charts Graphs Icons Titles Text Custom Illustrations
When it comes to incorporating graphics into your infographic design, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The graphics that will be most effective for you will depend on your brand, your audience, and what kind of information you’re presenting. It would be great for a fun, quirky brand to use cartoon-inspired illustrations, but they would feel out of place on a more corporate infographic. In contrast, pie charts would be too stuffy for that fun and quirky brand-but great for a more traditional corporation. Make a list of the graphic elements your infographic design needs, and then figure out how you will make them come to life. Pre-designed templates might be useful depending on the elements you need.
Step 6: Choose Your Colors
You can use color to help tell your story and highlight key points. Make sure your graphic remains simple and readable by choosing an eye-catching palette. Depending on your chosen color, you can inspire different thoughts, feelings, emotions, and actions within your audience. Keep in mind: Color should be used as an aid for information and visual elements. Choose colors that will create the emotional response you desire from your audience when building your color palette. For example, when designing an infographic to present key financial data to your board of investors, you need to inspire trust. Blue conveys trustworthiness and stability and would serve your cause in this scenario. In an infographic that shows your explosive sales growth over the past year, use red to inspire passion and excitement. While infographics can significantly enhance the way you communicate to your audience, there are some common mistakes that most people make.
Tips to Improve Your Infographics
#1. Work from a Template
A template or wireframe helps to lay out the design, so you know where you’ll place each visual element and text. This allows you to examine if any adjustments need to be made in terms of visual layouts or the type of infographic used. It will guide the rest of your design and produce a more polished and professional infographic. Most graphic design tools like Canva offer many templates, so you don’t have to worry about alignment or layout design.
#2. Less Text is Better
The goal of infographics is to convey a lot of information quickly, so keeping text to a minimum wherever possible ensures that your design is clean and understandable. Every visual may contain statistics, headlines, and short summaries underneath the image so that it provides context to the image. You should keep your infographic text to a few short lines to avoid it looking cluttered.
#3. Use Icons
Creating infographics involves getting as much useful information in for your customers as possible while keeping the design simple and easy to read. Including so much data can be overwhelming, but combining text, images, and graphs can make it easier for you to do so.
Wrapping Up
You now have the information you need to design and build your infographic. Whether you’re looking to create a fun infographic to inspire your audience or need an engaging visual to help explain intricate ideas to shareholders, an infographic is an effective tool to help capture attention and quickly disseminate information in an easy-to-understand format. You may also explore some online tools to create infographics that will grab everyone’s attention.
