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No matter how experienced you are as a graphic designer or how to Make an Infographic, making an infographic is usually a time-consuming and difficult process. Infographics are hard to get right because there are so many things to think about. The most common way to describe an infographic is as a simple picture that shows information and data.
By combining text, image, chart, diagram, and, more recently, video, an infographic is a useful way to show data and explain complicated topics in a way that can quickly lead to new insights and a better understanding. Even though they have only recently become popular in the mainstream, they have been used in newsrooms around the world for a long time as part of Editorial Design.
In the last few years, data journalism and storytelling with data have become more popular in the news industry, while the Internet has become the perfect place for more complex data-based stories and visualizations.
How to Make an Infographic
Define Your Audience
If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Similarly, if you try to create an infographic that is interesting to everyone, it will not be interesting to anyone.
In order to create a good infographic, it is important to decide who the infographic is for and likewise who it is not for. Who your target audience is will determine the data you use, how much jargon you use, the overall style of the infographic, and how much detail you need to provide.
Define Your Goals
Just like your visual will be vague if you have no audience in mind, your visual will look unfocused if you don’t have a clear goal. An infographic can have several goals. It can:
- Visualize a process
- Report on data
Gather Your Information
The next step is to ensure that the information gathered supports your goals. This step is where many people get stuck. If the core of the infographic is meaningful information, where do you get the information from? If the goal is to present the data visualization in an easily digestible form, where do you get the data?
First, the easiest place to start is your own company. You can get lots of data to turn into infographics, including analytics, sales data, SOPs, etc. However, make sure you have permission to use the data.
Choose a Type of Infographic
- Process infographics
- Comparison infographics
- Timeline infographics
- Informational infographics
- List infographics
Create a Logical Hierarchy in Your Data
It is time to structure the information gathered in step 3. The reason why we do this first is that it will be difficult to adapt once we start designing.
If you create a structure in Word or Google Docs, you will have an overview and can replace the data without too much trouble. Trying to do that after designing the graphics can be a hassle.
Pick and Customize an Infographic Template That Fits Your Message
I’ll be honest with you: unless you are a designer, don’t design an infographic from scratch. I know everyone likes to think they are good at design, but unless you take the time to develop an eye for it, you will never know what works and what doesn’t.
Good design doesn’t make an infographic successful, but you don’t want a graphic that is so poorly designed that it starts to detract from the message. A well-structured but OK-designed infographic will do better than a perfectly designed infographic, which is all over the place!
- Adjusting an infographic template in Piktochart
- Adjusting colors
- Adjusting text & fonts
- Adding images and icons
Download, Share, or Embed Your Infographic Design
Once your infographic is complete, you can download it as a PNG or PDF and email it or share it on social media. If you add links to your infographic that point to other resources, it is not meant to be downloaded as an image.
You can embed the infographic on your own website. To do this, go to “Share,” check the box to publish the infographic, and click “Show embed code.” You can now paste the code fragment into your website.
Why Use Infographics?
Infographics are all the rage these days. Everywhere you look, you see infographics on basically every topic you can think of. The reason for this is not surprising. Humans are visual creatures, and we prefer visual illustrations to reading 10 pages of the same content. The old saying goes, “Seeing is believing,” and that still holds true today.
We see memes, infographics, and other graphics being shared on social media as well. Infographics can present information in a concise and efficient manner. If you have information, you can turn it into an infographic. If you have information, you can turn it into an infographic.