Feb 20 2012

Infographics: Information can be beautiful

Infographics are appearing everywhere, you just can’t escape them. But what are they and are they any use?

Infographics have been around for millions of years in one form or another. Early cave paintings detailed daily life (kill buffalo, eat buffalo, grunt…), while in 1858 Florence Nightingale even used hers to detail the causes of mortality in the army (she was a cheery lady).

Florence Nightingale Infographic – 1858 – Wikipedia

From this, historically we know they have been used to convey information in an easily digestible way. The benefit being that you can get your message across without saturating your audience with data. After all, what’s easier to take in, an image or pages of text?

It also makes your information easier to share and that, essentially, is the point isn’t it, getting your message out there.

The best Infographics are simple, easy to understand and look good. The key here is to remember the relevance of your information against your target audience. There is no point providing your recent sales figures using cat imagery when you work in the dog industry is there?

Here are some infographic tips:

What’s the message?
Think about the information you want to convey. It may be company statistics or a story about the history of your brand. Whatever it may be, you must make sure your data is reliable and true.

Visual appeal
Make it look good. Do your research, see what you like and don’t like and then if you can create it yourself, great. If you can’t, get someone who can.

Please note though, if you want to convey your information professionally, don’t rely on Clip Art or other such offensive image banks. (Sorry Clip Art).

Be original
As you should with everything you do, try to make it original; something that hasn’t been done before, something that stands out from the crowd. As I previously mentioned at the start of this article, they are EVERYWHERE. So getting yours noticed will take some work and creative thinking.

So now you’re ready to go, what is it you want to say? Whatever it is, remember these few pieces of information and you’ll be on the right track.

Have you created an Infographic? Was it successful? Got any tips? We’d love to see and share them.

Here are a couple of my recent favourites: (click to make bigger)