Every once in a while, you may find yourself having to present complicated information in a simple way. If you are dealing with abstract ideas, large amounts of data, statistics, timelines, and detailed minutia then you may want to use an Infographic. Infographics are basically visual ways to show bigger picture concepts of data. Infographics take big complex ideas and make them snackable – so to speak. Infographics have been popular for years. They have popped up in everything from social media posts, to newspapers and books. Even some maps will use infographic-type imagery to give more information to the consumer. Â At the end of the day, most people would rather look at an infographic than a spreadsheet.
If you plan on creating your own infographics, then you’ll need a great place to pull imagery from. Lucky for you this is only a click away at Creative Fabrica. Just about any icon or image, you could use for your infographics are meticulously organized in their libraries. In this post, we will talk about how to find the right images for your infographic and how to go about creating them. Before we do that you will first need to make some decisions and organize your data.
Who is your audience and what is your goal?
When taking on an infographic you’ll want to decide why? What do you want to achieve with it? Who is it for? Asking these questions early on will help you tailor your info chart to meet those goals. An infographic for professionals may look different and need different info than one for novices. Age groups, demographics, and education level may affect how you present your info. Do you need to keep it entertaining? The style of the infographic will depend on your audience.
What is your goal? Is your goal to answer a question? Is it to entertain? Is it to help make comparisons? The end goal of your graphic will help you figure out what type of infographic you’ll need to create. Part of knowing the end goal is also how you plan on distributing to the infographic. Social media infographics may be different in size and look than something you’d print out or see on a poster.
Gather your info
Do you have the data to support your goal? Do you have permission to use it? Once you have your data you’ll need to brainstorm how you’ll want to present it. Highlight the key topics and subject lines. It’s good to look at infographic examples to see if your data would fit well.
Creating the infographic
Before you get to far you’ll want to decide on the type of infographic you’ll be making. Here are some examples here. Once you find a style you like you’ll probably want to sketch something out on paper to help give you a direction for your project. Once you do this you are ready to start gathering the images you’ll use for your infographic. In the example above the topic was WIFI and security. I typed in terms related to that in the Creative Fabrica search box. There were many options. Even more specific options popped up when I narrowed down the topic. There were images for networks and VPN. You may be surprised with how specific images can get. Before you start laying down and adapting the images you’ll need create a background. Sometimes you can just alter an infographic that’s already created. In infographics, solid color backgrounds and simple shapes work best. You don’t want the background image to distract from the data that you will be presenting.
In our example above we just used simple colored rectangles as the background. Once our background was in place we added a title to the top. If you are looking for fonts ideas and placements of them you can go to a neat website called Fonts In Use. This site has various examples of text used in real-life examples in various mediums. Creative Fabrica is full of fonts to choose from if you don’t want the standard font on your computer.
Once the title is finished it’s time to start putting in the graphics. You’ll often find a great image but you’ll need to alter it for your needs. The images come as vector files or as jpegs. If you have a vector editing program you can open it up there and make the changes you need. For this post and example, we used Photoshop. The first image we got from our Creative Fabrica search was the House Wi-fi image on the top next to the title. This is image was from sayangnadyapkm3. We like the image but needed to erase the white background from the jpeg. Then we changed the color of the icon to white. This way it would match our theme. There are a few ways to do this in Photoshop. You can do the Color Overlay filter or you can use the Paint Bucket fill tool and fill over the color with the one you want. Once we did all this we shrunk the size of the image and placed it near the title. For all the other images in the infographic, we did similar techniques. Some images you may have to combine like we did the eye and network image. After we placed all the images we added the text areas next to them. In our example, we just use temp text to show the example.
The Graphics we used were:
- Graphic was from hansganspbk2 on Creative Fabrica
- Wifi Graphic from sayangnadyapkm3
- Arrow Graphic from ciloraphic
- Password Graphic from ciloraphic
- Vpn password raraden655
- Network Graphic by myvector
- Eye by hansganspbk2
- Firewall by My Vector
- Technology by cool.coolpkm3
CREATIVE FABRICA ELEMENTS
If you type infographic in the search bar on the Creative Fabrica site you will see that there are great elements beyond just icons to help organize your infographics. There are templates that you can customize. There are flags, shapes, and banners that you can place text and images on. In the search tool you’ll have no problem finding charts, shapes, backgrounds, fonts, images people and objects.
A final thing about infographics
Before you start building your infographic it is often helpful to draw your idea on paper. It can be crude shapes and text but it will help you get a feel for how you want to lay it out before you get too far into the project.
At the end of the day, your infographics should show data and allow the viewer to understand bigger picture concepts. Infographics should avoid distorting what data really says. Infographics work well when they help the eyes compare different data and complex data in a pleasing way. Do your data flow in an easy-to-follow way? Do the graphic, text, and color complement each other? It is always good if either by the title or the presentation it is very clear the purpose and goal of the infographic.
Infographics can be fun to read, fun to make and they can be an amazing too to help make complicated ideas more snackable. Good luck in your infographic creations.
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