Over the past decade, infographics have become increasingly popular as a way to display complex content in an easy-to-understand manner. If you’ve never created infographics before now, you may be wondering what this type of design is and why it’s useful. When implemented correctly, infographics can help you market your business, brand, or website. In fact, infographics have been a highly popular marketing tool for businesses in recent years.
Despite how advantageous it can be to use infographics, many website owners don’t understand the difference between visual content, infographics, and visual design. While infographics display content and information in a visual manner, they are much more specific than visual content. The following goes into more detail about infographics and the steps you need to take to create them.
What Is an Infographic?
An infographic is a visual representation of either data or information. However, infographics have a certain design philosophy to them that you should understand before creating one. When making an infographic, it’s possible to combine a text image, diagram, and chart into a single graphic.
More modern infographics are also able to contain small videos. This type of visual content has proven to be an effective method for promoting and informing prospects for any type of business. Complex information can be displayed in a simple and easy-to-understand way.
Infographics are visual representations of a story, a method for increasing brand awareness, and a tool that you can use to inform and educate your customers. Even though infographics have only been popular on the internet for around a decade, basic forms of these graphics have been used across newsrooms for decades.
Why Use Infographics?
Infographics can help you make complicated information easier to understand. As such, you can use infographics to:
- Explain a complicated process in short and simple steps
- Provide readers with a short overview of a more complex topic
- Compare multiple products or services
- Summarize a report or lengthy blog post
- Show survey data or research findings
Because of how versatile infographics are, practically any business can benefit from using them.
How Do I Create an Infographic?
Creating infographics is made relatively easy depending on the program or application you use while making it. While there are dozens of programs you could download to start creating infographics, the following are widely considered to be the best options at your disposal.
If you want to better understand how to create an infographic, let’s take a look at Visme and how this tool is used. Visme provides users with access to free images, fonts, and other assets. You can also select from hundreds of separate pre-made templates before you start creating an infographic. Keep in mind that signing up with Visme is free, after which you’ll automatically be given the opportunity to select your preferred template. There are paid and free templates that you can select from your dashboard.
Once you’ve chosen a template, you will then be able to edit it and add your own content for full customization. The Visme editor provides you with ample fonts, text, colors, images, and icons that allow you to personalize the infographic and make sure that it matches your brand identity. The inclusion of a drag-and-drop editor means that you should be able to complete the customization process in as little as 5-10 minutes.
It’s also possible to add animations, links, charts, graphs, and brand assets. Once you’ve settled on the visual design for your infographic, you can add content blocks to further extend this graphic. When all customization is completed and content is added, you can download the infographic and place it on your website or use it with marketing materials. If you use Visme, downloads are available in PDF, HTML5, or image formats.
Data Visualization Infographics
One of the three primary types of infographics involves data visualization infographics. Keep in mind that data visualization can occur via graphs and charts. This term refers to the visual representation of any data. The purpose of performing data visualization is to make data easier to read and understand. When data is displayed in reports or papers, this information is typically difficult to parse and fully comprehend. Data visualization infographics aid in comprehension by displaying these numbers alongside a story or much more descriptive content.
At the end of the infographic, readers should be able to fully understand each piece of data as well as the broader picture of what this data means. When you create an effective data visualization infographic, the graphic should be visually appealing and meaningful at the same time.
Information Design Infographics
Information design infographics use a combination of visual and text elements to properly simplify or explain the given topic. These infographics can also be used as a guide that takes readers through numerous steps to perform an action. These infographics typically focus on text as opposed to imagery.
In fact, many business owners will use information design infographics to summarize lengthy videos or blog posts that have been placed on their websites. In many cases, these infographics will use visual narratives to effectively tell a story, which can involve different font styles and sizes.
Editorial Infographics
Data editorial infographics are graphics that major publications have been creating for decades for the purpose of making visual content that can be readily shared with friends or relatives. Many publications have used editorial infographics to make sure that readers remain engaged.
In the past, these infographics were centered on basic lines, pie charts, and bars with a minimal amount of illustration. In most cases, illustrations would only be used in more comprehensive articles and features. However, publications have begun to make use of graphic content and imagery at a much higher rate over the past decade.
Keep in mind that editorial infographics typically contain useful and interesting insight from informed sources. The narratives that are displayed in these infographics should focus on editorial narratives as opposed to branded messages.
What Makes an Infographic Design Effective?
Now that you have a better idea of what infographics are as well as the various types of infographics, you can focus on making one for your business or brand. Before you get started, let’s take a look at some best practices that should make your design more effective.
- Be creative
- Learn about your audience
- Use visually appealing colors and fonts
- Enhance infographic with icons and graphics
- Consider interactive features
- Implement a visual hierarchy
First, you should focus on being creative and original when making an infographic. Over the past decade, millions of different infographics have been made and can currently be found on the internet. Your infographic will likely have a better chance of being noticed if it’s different than the rest and at least somewhat unique. Consider doing some research before you start making your infographic. Try to identify the types of topics that your audience will find most appealing. You could then search for visuals or other infographics that have already been made on the topic, which may give you some inspiration.
Another suggestion is that you should know who your audience is before you’ve created an infographic. Find out what topics they’re interested in and the designs that would most appeal to them. Make sure that you use the right tone when speaking to your audience. The information you glean from your research should simplify the process of making an effective infographic.
Use appealing colors and fonts as well, which increase the likelihood that you will be able to engage your primary audience. If you don’t use the right fonts and colors, there’s a possibility that your infographic won’t properly resonate.
When placing text in an infographic, try to avoid putting too much text in one spot, which can make your infographic more boring than it should be. It’s possible to enhance the text you place on infographics by adding graphics and icons. Supplement any captions, subheadings, and labels with illustrations, images, or icons.
You should also consider making your infographic interactive, which means that the graphic would no longer exist as a static image. The tools mentioned above allow you to add various animations to your graphic. It’s also possible to implement hover effects or insert clickable buttons/links.
The final suggestion is to create a visual hierarchy by positioning your information in an organized fashion, which involves segmenting the information by level of importance. If your infographic content and design has a properly established visual hierarchy, the entire design will appear to be more visually appealing, more professional, and cleaner.
Creating infographics gives you the opportunity to display written content or data in a way that’s more streamlined and easy to understand. The best practices detailed above should help you create infographics that allow you to better market your brand and enhance your website.
