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Incredible Infographics: Designing Your Infographic

From design to printing the final product, information about creating free and low cost infographics to make visually appealing posters and presentations.

What are Infographics?

Infographics are visual or graphical representations of information. While it may take some time to plan and produce your own infographic it can be rewarding to you and your audience to examine your research in a different way. Infographics are visually appealing, provide varied and detailed information, and can be easy to interpret and understand.

In this Libguide, you will be introduced to basic help in designing your own infographic, free and low-cost online tools to make your infographic, and finally, information on printing your masterpiece!

Hunting for Samples

Want to see a variety of examples of infographics?  

They are everywhere, just do a search for "infographics" on Google and you'll be flooded with images of all sorts and kinds!

Types of Infographics

  1. Statistical-based Infographics: targeted to people with specialized knowledge ofr your topic. This type works best with lots of content based in charts and numbers. Often used in company and industry research.
  2. Time-based or Chronological Infographics: presents a chronological sequence of events that happen over time, a time line that takes the reader on a journey.
  3. Process-based Infographics: Makes high use of images and photos to convey a process, such as following a recipe or in building something.
  4. Location-, Directional-, or Geographic-based Infographics: Relates the information to geography.  Examples of this are campus maps, astonomy, major events (earthquake effects) and so on.
  5. Research Results Infographics: Used most often to show the results of a study or survey. Should make use of graphics and icons to represent different pieces of study or survey.
  6. Compare & Contrast Infographics: this type is used to show how something has grown or changed.  This can easily show accomplishments or major changes.  Head-to-head comparisons help with visualizing the information, bar graphs are a popular way to illustrate contrasts.
  7. Did You Know? Infographics: Answering a question and providing supporting facts for those answers. This can serve to highlight statistics and other numbers in a straightforward manner.  Another name for this might be "Fun Facts."
  8. Demographics Infographics: These work best when communicating information about a specific group or population.  For instance, if you were displaying numbers related to categories of Newman University students: male/female, ethnic groups, majors, first-time college students, religious affiliations, etc.

Why Should You Make an Infographic?

  • Provides visual presentations of information including statistics about a certain topic using graphics and text
  • Creativity is used to display data
  • Appeals to different parts of a reader's brain, helping them process the information in multiple ways
  • Reader's are able to view the results of your research in a compact format, a type of "bird's eye-view"
  • May be an extension of a written article
  • Helps to convey a complex messages in a clear and concise format
  • Helps the reader's spatial-temporal reasoning, which makes learning easier

Things to Consider as You Plan Your Infographic

  • Be focused!  What is your point?
    • Don't share every piece of information, prioritize and let the data tell the story
  • Use a combination of graphics, texts and statistics
  • Identify what type of infographic you'd like to make, it could impact the information you choose to include
  • Create a consistent color scheme
    • Don't be afraid to use color!
    • Color visuals are 80% more likely to be read
  • Experiment with font and image sizes
  • Make use of visual signals to direct the eyes of the audience
    • Information should flow from one point to the next
    • This can be subtle or obvious (using arrow or other directional graphics)

Three parts of an infographic:

  1. Visual: color graphics icons, theme, etc.
  2. Content: statistics, time frames, references
  3. Knowledge: facts and conclusions to convey an overall message

Your infographic should be thoroughly researched and the data needs to be backed up by established facts!

Key Components of an Infographic

  1. Story: Just as with any story you write, an infographic should contain a title, a beginning, middle and conclusion.
  2. Style:
    1. Visual appeal--catch the reader's eye
    2. Manageability--overview of message, don't be too detailed
    3. Hierarchy--use headings, color, text and images to showcase important information
  3. Simplicity: Decide upon one style for your images, graphics, and photos and stick to it!
  4. Size: Use fonts and images that are easy to read and interpret, don't go microscopic!
  5. Statistics: Use research, articles, and statistics to support your information.  Make sure they are current, reliable and on topic.
  6. Sources: Use quotes and give credit to your sources to establish credibility.
  7. Shareability: Provide readers with tools they need to follow up for more info, organization names, URLs, etc.

Source used: "Infographics: a practical guide for librarians" by Beverly E. Crane, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.