5 Simple Steps to Creating a Stunning Infographics

What is Infographic?

An infographic (information graphic) is a representation of information in a graphic format designed to make the data easily understandable at a glance. People use infographics to quickly communicate a message, to simplify the presentation of large amounts of data, to see data patterns and relationships, and to monitor changes in variables over time. 

1. Select a story for your Infographic

This is the hardest part. What should your infographic be about? What is the core message you want to deliver? For us, this is a discovery process. There are two approaches:

Data driven approach – this is where you already have data and you want to tell the story based on your data. 

Problem/Question approach – this approach requires you to first think about the problem you’re trying to solve or the questions you’re trying to answer with your story.

2. Choose the type of Infographic to visualize your story

You’ve got your story. Now you have to choose the type of infographic you want to use. Wait, there are different types of infographics? In fact, there are loosely 10 different types of infographics. Before you roll your eyes, here are all 10 types:

Statistical Infographics – shows a summary or overview of data with one or more graphs, tables or lists.

Timeline Infographics (time-oriented) – shows progress of information over a chronological time period.

Process Infographics – demonstrates a linear or branching process as a how to, teaches the workings of an object or flow chart showing choices in a decision process.

Informational Infographics – are most likely a poster that summarizes topic with some extra bits of information.

Geographic Infographics – displays data with a location map.

Compare/Contrast Infographics – illustrates notable similarities or differences as a “this versus that” infographic or as a table or simple list.

Hierarchical Infographics – demonstrates a chart with levels.

Research-based Infographics –  similar to the statistical infographic, but based on research. Can be used to compare unlike items with popular sets of data

Interactive Infographics – gives viewers the control to modify the infographic and is web-based.

Word cloud Infographics – displays a cluster of words to show associations between words and concept.

How you want your story to be told determines which type of infographic you should choose. 

3. Get the relevant data for your story

More boring stuff next – getting the data. There are 3 approaches to getting your data to make your infographic.

Your own data – if you took the data driven approach to infographics, you are probably using your own data. Even if you didn’t, your organization or company may have data on the subject or story you want to write about. Ask around. Send some emails.

Original research – OC (original content) is king! Nothing beats OC. You don’t need a research team or a data scientist for this. And unless you’ve got a big budget don’t even think of paying a research or marketing firm for this. You can roll your own survey research with a tool like survey monkey or Google Forms. Or with manual coding of data. We’re writing an article about how we do our own research. I’ll add a link to it here once it’s done.

Data sources – there are plenty of public and private data sources out there. Here is a short list:

Data.gov – this is the US government’s open data website. You can search for all kinds of public data from healthcare data to economic data. It takes a bit of digging to get the datasets, but worth exploring.

UN data – UN data is international/world data on a variety of subjects such as employment, poverty, population, export/import numbers, growth,..etc. There are 34 databases in total and you can filter by country.

Google Public Data – Google has a search engine specifically for searching publicly available data. This is a good place to start as you can search a large amount of datasets in one place.

Pew Research Data – Pew Research is think tank that does a lot of research and polling in the areas of public interest such as  internet, science and technology trends, global attitudes, religion and public life, and social and demographic trends. This is one of my favorite places to visit. They also publish excellent reports and make all their datasets available for download.

World Bank – The World bank has a lot of financial and economic data. Great if you want high level data.

World Economic Forum – WE forum has more nuanced data on a variety of topics. Their data are embedded in their reports.

Statista – this is data aggregator that has thousands of data sets. It is a paid service though you do get some interesting data sets unavailable publicly.

The rough guide here is to find at least one data set or number per story point. At the end of this step, you should have all the data you need to start putting your infographic together.

4. Design your infographic

Ok – you’ve got the story, the type of infographic and the data. Now you have to put them all together into an attractive looking infographic. 

You can choose from any of these infograph templates:

Check This Site

5. Promote your infographic

Congratulations! You’re finally done with the infographic. Not really. If you’re creating the infographic for marketing purposes, you’ve got one more step, and that’s promoting it. After all, there is no point creating content if no one sees it, is there?

Here are some methods on how to promote your infographics:

• Share on all your social channels
• Send out an email newsletter. Check out how to make emails more engaging with infographics here.
• Ask your advocates to share explicitly.
• Post it on social discovery sites like Stumbled Upon, Reddit, Imgur..etc.
• Outreach – find bloggers who will benefit from sharing your infographic.

Credit to: Venngage Team