Infographics, a portmanteau of words featuring Information and Graphics, can be addressed as a visual collection of textual and imagery data. It is an interactive graphic with a sole intention to impart and give a quick understanding of the information inscribed with the help of pictures and minimal text.
An info graphical representation of data deals with a lot of creative aspects and hence makes the information attractive, and engaging to the users in a single glance.
Infographics are seeking extensive applications to enhance documentation across various verticals like education, corporate scenarios, marketing and advertisement platforms to make the information friendly and appealing to the reader, thereby driving a lot of traffic.
The main objective revolving around the idea of creating infographics can be accredited to the growing requirement of placing and using minimum textual content to meet the reader’s eye. Textual content when lengthy and too informative is likely to be less appealing to any viewer.
Best Charts, Graphs, and Diagram Tools
- 10 Best Online Chart Maker of 2023
- 10 Best Microsoft Visio Alternatives 2023
- 10 Best Org Chart Maker of 2023
- 10 Best UML Diagram Tools 2023
- 10 Best Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) Tools 2023
On the other hand, graphical content embedded with fonts, colors, images, and icons, among various other elements is visually superlative and tends to show larger engagement and understanding with the reader.
As per some statistics it can be estimated that visually captivating and top-notch quality infographics are over 30 times more readable and agreeable in comparison to textual articles.
Infographics, are used to incur a quick understanding of content and specifically to enhance brand information and awareness, to simplify lengthier content and to bring value-addition to local and social media posts and blogs.
With a lot of focus on the “what” and “why” of infographics, let us walk through the 8 most simple and essential steps to be traversed while creating and designing an infographic.
Process of creating an Infographic in 8 Simple Steps
As described in the communication above, infographics are the most common form of content that can be excessively shared across both online and offline portals. This graphical content makes the highest online presence in social media channels owing to its versatile and appealing appearance to attract the audience.
With a wide variety of tools as well as software available and easily accessible as infographic makers to furnish an infographic from scratch, let us have a look on the 8 most prominent steps in the procedure associated with making an infographic.
Step 1: Know your Target Audience
The foremost step in infographic generation is to get a quick and coherent understanding of the target audience and what content they intend to watch and are curious to know about.
This is the most crucial step and it forms the foundation of the infographic in terms of what the targeted audience would be interested to perceive. This step demand a few rounds of clear analysis by the user while creating the infographic.
To make this audience analysis easy, here are a few points to ponder on:
- Who will be your audience?
- How are they going to access and view the message?
- What would be their key understanding i.e. what message will they derive upon viewing?
- What are the challenges or barriers likely to be faced while delivering the message?
Step 2: Arrange and evaluate the infographic data
Once done with the brainstorming and analysis of the target audience, the next step is to initiate the actual distribution of content on the chart space.
It is very crucial at this stage to remember from the analysis in the previous step to pull out important and intended data that will please and engage the audience in question as placing unintended or uninteresting data will draw less viewer traffic.
This step focuses on finding, inspecting and collecting and then putting together key data pointers that would add value to the infographic.
An important to-do in this step is to ensure the quality of the infographic data. In simple words, it is extremely crucial to ensure that the information to be placed and distributed across the infographic is derived from trustworthy resources.
Step 3: Handpick and customize the infographic template of individual choice
The best part about creating an infographic in this procedure is that it curtails off the additional job of downloading or installing software to furnish the graph with colorfully pleasing templates.
There is an ease of access and abundance of attractive and visually appealing templates offered by the infographic making tools such as easel.ly. These web-based application tools can be easily accessed in any desktop or gadget browser and are enriched with numerous good-looking templates.
The user can easily access a template as per preference or requirement from a range of thousands of stunning looking structures by logging into the application and simply clicking on the template.
Once done with the selection, the template will be customized with regards to images, icons, widgets, illustrations, chart and animated objects. This step also deals with personalizing and branding the infographic with the required font texts, colors and sizes.
Best Charts, Graphs, and Diagram Tools
- 10 Best Online Chart Maker of 2023
- 10 Best Microsoft Visio Alternatives 2023
- 10 Best Org Chart Maker of 2023
- 10 Best UML Diagram Tools 2023
- 10 Best Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) Tools 2023
Step 4: Accurate selection and use of infographic colors
This can be touted as the most important step in the infographic generation, as it emphasizes the influence of colors on the whole structure to engage or please the audience.
It is crucial at this point in the procedure to not overwhelm the viewer with overcrowding the infographic with multiple colors as it may draw a negative response. It is technically feasible to skillfully and sparingly make use of three primary and two secondary colors from the color pallet to enhance the infographic.
Step 5: Careful assessment and selection of headings
Once done with the careful pickup of colors, it is also crucial to pay heed to the quality and the length of the headings and subheadings as they will be the first lines of content to catch the viewer’s eye.
The main title and the subheadings should have a high font size and contrast volume. Insertion of decorative elements to headings can add value to make it stand out and appear more appealing in comparison to the rest of the entire content.
Step 6: Organize the infographic elements
Post the relevant choice of colors and titles, the next important step deals with the placement of content of the infographic.
To make this data distribution easy here’s a pro tip to skillfully align and place the information on the graph – Picture the infographic as a grid with multiple invisible lines to gain an insight on arranging and lining up the data elements. It is also necessary to keep the textual and visual elements lined up beside each other in the grid.
Step 7: Highlight the most important content in the infographic
This step emphasizes on picking out the most crucial content in the whole infographic that should not miss the reader’s eye.
For instance, the presence of key statistical data in the graph can be enhanced with larger fonts and different colors in comparison to the whole other text or content.
The main purpose of these data highlights is to make a long lasting-impression on the viewer about the most relevant and important data on the infographic.
Step 8: Attentive selection of images and charts
After the content on the infographic is carefully crafted for alignment, placement, colors, fonts, highlights and elements.
The last step involves the insertion of images, animated objects and icons as well as illustrations that need to be skillfully distributed with the content along with the textual data. This is a very crucial aspect in the whole process as overcrowding the infographic can distract the viewer’s attention.
Hence an important reminder at this last step is make sure to visually enhance the content and aesthetics of the whole structure by keeping the charts simple in presentation.
The End Note
Reminiscing the significance of infographics and introspecting the execution of the 8 most vital steps to create an infographic, here is an important reminder before initiating the infographic generation process.
The first and foremost rule is to think about the target viewer and how to render value to the targeted audience while creating an infographic.
Secondly, colors and fonts play a key role in the beautification of the whole graph to highlight and bring the intended content to the viewers notice.
The placement of images and other illustrations should be kept to a minimum as overcrowding the infographic with too many objects may hamper its aesthetics.
Lastly, an analysis of all these pointers is extremely critical in terms of simplicity i.e. keeping all the content and imagery short and to the point that it does not draw rejection.
Overall, the infographic generation process is pretty basic and once all the steps have been carefully worked upon and executed, the infographic can be handy to any user in less time without demanding any additional insight on designing skills.
There are a number of tools supporting the chart creation, with easel.ly being one of the prominent online applications.