Educating your audience, or presenting to a client or manager need not be a dull task! Infographics are the shiny new craze that can turn information into social art that people won’t just remember – they’ll share.
It’s not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals. Even outside of the box ideas like proposing via an infographic are showing how more and more people are getting creative with them, so we provided a few ideas for infographics and some great tips and tools for designing them!
Ideas for infographic formats include:
- Timelines
- Flow charts
- Annotated maps
- Graphs
- Venn diagrams
- Size comparisons
- Showing familiar objects or similar size or value
Designing An Infographic
Some great tips for designing infographics:
- Keep it simple! Don’t try to do too much in one picture.
- Decide on a color scheme.
- Research some great facts and statistics.
- Think of it as a visual essay: ensure your arguments hold and are relevant.
- Remember that it’s all about quickly conveying the meaning behind complex data.
- Draw conclusions.
- Reference your facts in the infographic.
- Include your URL so people can be sure who made it.
Maybe you aren’t design savvy and infographics are something you want to create and you don’t hold own the adobe creative suite. Don’t fret! There are some real good resources out there to help you display your data, text, and other ideas graphically.
Visual.ly
If you like clever data visualizations, you’ll love Visual.ly, a startup that lets you find and make infographics with all kinds of web-based data.
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.
Wordle
Described as a word cloud generating “toy”, Wordle is great for giving clients or management a picture of how the brand “looks” in the public gaze. Enter in a few keywords or pop your URL into Wordle, and it’ll generate a colorful design of words often used on the site. You can customize the design to your liking. Create your own word clouds!
Google Public Data Explorer
What’s a list without a Google product? The explorer lets you choose from numerous (neatly organized) public datasets, pulled from the US Census Bureau. Or upload your own data and create infographics embeddable on websites and blogs.
This IBM Research tool gives you two choices: an option to browse through existing sets of data, or use your own. The public database includes everything from population density across the U.S. to Internet browsers by popularity. If you have your own data on hand, you can upload it to Many Eyes and craft your own visualization. The best part of this tool is that you have many different options insofar as the final product, from creating a world map to a network diagram.
Give it a shot and post your results in the comments!
