I think most people would agree that it is more enjoyable and easier to read text when the text is broken up by photos or videos. In fact, researchers from Xerox found that colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%. Humans, by nature, are very visual beings. Reading text and comprehending it is a visual task, but our brains tend to not understand text as quickly as we do images.
Infographics are the beautiful segway between text and photos, and burst onto the content marketing scene between 2010 and 2012, when searches for infographics increased by 800%. Infographics are visually compelling, and when done well, can communicate text, statistics, and pictures in a visual format that could potentially go viral. They teach facts and figures, but also connect with the reader in a way that text alone sometimes cannot.
To help you create the most stunning, awesome, intriguing infographics available, we’ve put together a list of the do’s, don’ts, and key elements of creating a great infographic for your business!
Make It Purposeful and Relevant
A great infographic tells a story, and it communicates one clear idea and objective. You are creating an infographic to cut through the noise of text only content, so make sure that you are not confusing your reader with too many ideas or irrelevant statistics.
Break it Down
Another awesome use of infographics is to break down complex information into simple, easy to understand graphics. Take this graphic from Huffington Post for example:
Before this became a graphic, it was probably a table of numbers that went on for pages and pages on Microsoft Excel. It is much harder to connect trends and connections, such as the fact that the northwest seems to be happier than the southeast, when the information is only viewed in number or table form. There also might have been a labor-intensive algorithm created to judge the word happiness score for each state, which most consumers probably wouldn’t understand. This graphic is a great representation of how to choose the most important information, and break it down into visuals that are easy to understand.
Cite Your Sources
If your infographic includes information that might surprise a consumer or customer, or leave them overly skeptical, it is a good idea to include the sources for your data somewhere in the graphic. This will allow them to follow up on the information, and keep you from coming under fire from the cynics. In the infographic below, they chose to include the sources in a small font at the bottom, so as not to detract from the infographic itself.
Source
Use Your Resources
While infographics can be amazing content for your business and brand, they can sometimes be rather time consuming to create. There are a few infographic makers available online that can help to expedite the actual graphic making process: Venngage and Piktochart are two of our favorites, but you can find plenty others here if those are not to your liking. The other time intensive part of infographic creation is the research for the information you will be displaying. Knowing your topic before starting your research can help drastically speed up your process.
