Infographics are visual representations of data and information. They make the presentation of information quick and clear. By presenting information that would have been rather boring to read in information graphics form, humans tend to assimilate the information faster than if it were to be in text.
Infographics are a great way of delivering complex information while keeping your audience’s interest intact.
What does an Infographic do?
Infographics allow people to use icons, images, graphs and numbers to pass across messages or information in a quick and visually appealing manner. This implies that by using infographics, your information becomes more attention-grabbing, straight to the point, and very easy to read.
Readers are afforded the opportunity of escaping volumes of information and enjoying infographics which makes readings understandable and easy to remember.
Below are some cool infographic ideas you can use to spice up your next project:
News Items
Instead of presenting news to your target audience in words alone, you can use infographics to prove your point. For instance, if you want to inform your audience about the importance of exercise to the body,
you can employ visuals of a person running, a healthy heart, or a simple dumbbell symbol. This can help give readers a quick and effective visual representation of the importance of exercise for optimal health.
Upcoming Events
To keep people informed about an upcoming event, for instance, a movie release, you can use infographics to keep them well informed. Other upcoming events can be a wedding ceremony, a business meeting, a friendly hangout, or even an election. Ensure that you regularly review upcoming events to utilize any opportunity to plug in content.
Existing Content
You can increase the visual appeal of your blog posts or press releases by using infographics to tell a new story, or an old one in a new and polished way. For instance, you can use infographics on a menu for easier direction of custom food orders customers can place at a restaurant. Take a look at the example below for a good illustration of this.
If your brand is already involved in content marketing, you can use infographics to add color to your existing content.
Helping Customers make Important Choices
You can employ infographics when providing honest information about your products and services and those of your competitors. This will enable your customers to weigh in their options before making a purchase.
Make sure to convince your customers to purchase your product especially if it is of high quality. Consumers have a way of telling an advertisement apart from useful information, and this is where infographics can come to your advantage. With its ability to communicate professionally, infographics may help improve customer loyalty when they realize that you give out important and helpful information.
Illustrate Small Differences
Infographics are useful in illustrating the tiniest differences between two or more things. In a case where you want to show your audience little differences between two things, products and brands, you can use infographics.
This will make it easier for them to spot the differences easily. For instance, if you want to show the differences between each museum based in Los Angeles, you can use infographics.
Illustrate a List
By using texts and images in a creative fashion, you can illustrate a list to your audience. The list can include a variety of content which can be made to fit a particular theme depending on your target audience.
Present a Wide Range of Options
Reading about various products and services can be a boring and daunting task. With the aid of infographics, people can get easy access to information and make brilliant choices from a wide range of options.
By using infographics, people can see different sides of a coin and choose the brand or product that suits their taste in an efficient manner.
Academic Studies
Infographics are an excellent tool for conveying academic data. You can use Google Scholar to search for topics in a variety of fields, from psychology to arts. This can help inspire your next idea or even help polish the one you already have.
Examples include studies on the frequency of utilization of workplace facilities, number of teenage pregnancies in the United States or various types of attachment styles. This will help your target audience to understand the information or data better and faster.
Tutorials
If you want to teach people how something works or how to do something, you can use infographics. But, you must ensure that the pictures and words correlate. For instance, you can make a tutorial by using infographics to show people 5 ways to remove stains from jeans.
Government Reports
There is a wide array of public data which is available from various tiers of the government and you can convert them into infographics for better understanding. Most of this information is easily accessible and can make great infographic ideas.
For example, you can convert data on causes of deaths in a year which can range from accidents, suicide, manslaughter, drowning to abortion, into digitally-illustrated symbols that represent these incidences.
Illustrate and Compare Abstracts Concepts
When you want to communicate a concept, feeling or an idea that is abstract and cannot be easily understood by word of mouth, you can employ the use of infographics.
This makes the communication of the concept, feeling or idea easy to understand by your target audience as there are some information that are better understood when translated into visual representations.
How to Make Your Own Cool Infographic
Infographic tools are very effective in bringing data and information to life. They are also very useful in passing across useful and important information to the target audience. By using some of the best infographics tools available, you can transform complex and boring information into visual representations that will be easy to understand and at the same time possess incredible visual appeal.
There are many tools and apps that you can use to make your own cool infographics:
Canva
It is an excellent online design tool and an infographic maker. Canva gives users the opportunity to create a variety of designs even if they are new to the design creation world. Providing a wide range of templates to pick from based on the design of your choice, Canva allows you to create designs for cards, banners and lots more.
Canva offers different paid options that you can choose from. The freemium purchases give you the option to buy premium templates, images and icons for a more custom look while the Canva for work is mainly used by small and medium sized business owners. Other paid options include Canva for Nonprofits, Canva for Education and Canva Enterprise (which is used by companies with large design teams).
It is quite easy to use to make infographics and the time required to create an infographic is about 30 minutes.
Piktochart
One of the best tools for creating a wide range of infographics is Piktochart. It offers you the opportunity to choose different selected formats including presentation size, poster, report and more.
You can either choose to create your own infographic from the beginning or choose from the array of templates that are available. Some of these templates are free while others require you to have a Pro or Lite plan. Other paid options include Piktochart Nonprofits and Piktochart Education.
One of the appealing features of Piktochart is the great step-by-step tutorials that help users understand how it works. It is easy to use and the time required to create an infographic is around 30 minutes.
Visme
Visme is a design tool that performs various functions. It allows users to create infographics, presentations, banners and lots more. When you log in with your account, click on the create button if you don’t have any project yet.
Select the type of project you would like to create — an infographic. Some templates are free while others require you to have a premium account. Visme affords users the opportunity to customize their infographics any way they want and even allows them to add effects or animate objects inside the infographics.
Visme is very practical and it takes about 30 minutes to create an infographic. There are various paid options on Visme: Visme (Standard, Enterprise, Team, Student, Teacher and Complete).
Infogram
This is a great tool which can be used to create simple infographics from complex data sets. One of the setbacks of Infogram is that free users have limited choices to choose from, but the paid versions of Infogram have some outstanding perks such as data analytics, link tracking, SQL connectors and engagement analytics.
If you are working on statistical data, Infogram is your best choice. If you also need a tool that comes handy when you want to assign numbers to graphs and maps, you can always choose Infogram.
Some of the paid options of Infogram include: Infogram (Pro, Team, Business and Enterprise). Its ease of use is intermediate and it takes about 45 minutes to create an infographic.
Snappa
The most promising aspect about Snappa is that you can get access to almost all the paid features using the free plan. However, one setback is that you will have limited downloads per month if you are on the free plan.
Snappa allows amateur users to create infographics, social media contents as well as custom designs with a wide range of templates to choose from. Users have access to numerous images, fonts and icons which will make their infographic creation experience a fantastic one.
It is quite easy to use and it takes only 15 minutes to create an infographic. Some of the paid options include Snappa Pro and Snappa Team.
Besides having grown up in the design Industry, Christiaan has advised some of the world’s largest companies on their branding & packaging designs. Has been the resident judge for design awards, and has spoken at numerous global design & marketing events. Christiaan founded the London office of the award-winning Cartils agency, and has founded the DesignBro.com platform.
