Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.
Who can resist a colourful, thoughtful venn diagram anyway? In terms of blogging success, infographics are far more likely to be shared than your average blog post. This means more eyeballs on your important information, more people rallying for your cause, more backlinks and more visits to your blog. In short, a quality infographic done well could be what your blog needs right now.
Designing An Infographic
Some great tips for designing infographics:
- Keep it simple! Don’t try to do too much in one picture.
- Decide on a colour scheme.
- Research some great facts and statistics.
- Think of it as a visual essay: ensure your arguments hold and are relevant.
- Remember that it’s all about quickly conveying the meaning behind complex data.
- Draw conclusions.
- Reference your facts in the infographic.
- Include your URL so people can be sure who made it.
Ideas for infographic formats include:
- Timelines;
- Flow charts;
- Annotated maps;
- Graphs;
- Venn diagrams;
- Size comparisons;
- Showing familiar objects or similar size or value.
Here are some great tutorials on infographic creation:
- How to Create Outstanding Modern Infographics
- Infographic Designs: Overview, Examples and Best practices
- Tutorial: Create Cool Infographics
- 10 of my Favourite Infographics
- 40 Useful and Creative Infographics
- Seven and a Half Steps to Successful Infographics
- The Anatomy of an Infographic
- 10 Tips for Journalists Designing Infographics
Creating Your Infographic
- Plan and research.
- If required, use free software to create simple graphs and visualisations of data.
- Use vector graphic software to bring these visualisations into the one graphic.
Ultimately, if you have a little design skill, the very best approach is to create all the simple graphs and illustrations yourself using vector graphic software. Your end result will be more visually attractive and you will have more freedom to be creative with it.
Free Online Tools For Creating Infographics
Stat Planet
Stat Planet allows you to create some amazing interactive visualisations, which you can then use as is or create a static image. It can be used within your browser or downloaded for free. Stat Planet gives you access to some great world data and lets you customise that in your visualisations. It also has some great map-based visualisations to try.
Hohli
Hohli is an intuitive, simple online chart maker. It’s incredibly easy to pick your chart type, add some data, vary the sizes and colours and see the finished chart. The finished charts are also very well designed and look great!
Creately
Creately lets you make easy-to-make diagrams and flow charts (easy to collaborate too). When you start, you can choose from a number of purpose-designed diagram types and quickly add your data to make your own chart. The end result looks very professional.
New York Times
New York Times’ Visualization Lab lets you use statistics from recent NYTimes articles to create visualisations in various formats. You can also see other people’s visualisations and see how other people choose to display the same data.
Many Eyes
Many Eyes lets you upload your own data or use data already stored on the site. The visualisations themselves are well-designed and very professional-looking. This is definitely the easiest way to use your own data for online visualisations.
Google Public Data
Google Public Data lets you easily take public data and transform it into an infographic of your choice. These beautiful, colourful graphics simplify and communicate the data perfectly.
Wordle
Wordle lets you create word visualisations using text you enter. There are plenty of interesting designs to choose from. Enter whole books, short passages or see what other people have used. In this example, we can see the US constitution visualised.
Free Software For Creating Infographics
Tableau
Tableau is a free Windows-only software for creating visualisations. As you can see, these impressive graphs are colourful and quite unique.
Gapminder
GapMinder is a free Adobe Air (cross-platform by nature) application to ensure you have current data on major world issues and can create visualisations for your purposes. Data is updated yearly and released with new versions of the application. The visuals are also quite impressive!
Inkscape
Inkscape is a free vector graphic software available for many platforms. This is the ideal free option for the creation of your overall infographic. Simple and intuitive, you should have no problems importing your visualisations and combining them with other visuals to create your masterpiece.
Love Infographics?
If you’re a fan of infographics, these tools will probably become part of your everyday blogging tools. Feel free to let us know of more great tools in the comments!
Also, check out some of MakeUseOf’s favourite infographics:
Nice post. Thanks for sharing
The creately is my choice and for both professional and cool diagrams, its a good solution
Hum, strange. Everything I did on http://www.wordle.net/, didn't seem to support the plugin's. None of them.
Hi everybody,
For my monthly reporting I use maps but as I have to do it manually it take me too much time.
Does anybody know where can make map illustration for free?
Thank you in advance
I believe Tableau has maps integrated
Hi
I really like info graphics. Thank you for the resources and tips.
Thanks, I was looking for this, some of these infographic tool's look like they may take up your time trying to create a perfect infographic, but like anything the if you want quality then be prepared to wait
As a classroom teacher who loves to show pupils why data is so important in the world this collection of links and software packages is just fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to compile this!
Hope you can put them to good use. :)
Love that infographics and visualizations are getting some traction and much needed publicity! Though I knew most of these sites, it is a space I believe will be huge over the next 5 years. Thanks! -Brian
Corda Technologies has a wonderful tools to make data visualizations... see http://www.corda.com/corda-gal... for some examples.
Infographics wouldn't be so popular if they weren't effective for communicating information.. thanks for passing along the tools.
Very useful post!
I love Gapminder--even blogged about it after using it to create a chart for an earlier blog post: http://circleofignorance.wordp...
Played around with Wordle a little and am inspired to go back. How did I not know about the New York Times Visualization Lab?? I need to experiment. And some of the others look interesting, too. Great leads! I'm going to be playing with these for a while.
I love Gapminder--even blogged about it after using it to create a chart for an earlier blog post: http://circleofignorance.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/review-gapminder-makes-statistics-fun/
Played around with Wordle a little and am inspired to go back. How did I not know about the New York Times Visualization Lab?? I need to experiment. And some of the others look interesting, too. Great leads! I'm going to be playing with these for a while.
Infographic trend? Information design is a way for people to faster understand information. It is a science on its own... No one forces you to look, like or even learn with any of them. What you can say about «trends» is that the information is supposed to be clear, to lead to knowledge, but sometimes it feels that the product itself hasn't been very well produced. I am a communication designer, and, at university, this was one of my best projects.
cool! TY
Millions thanks!!! I've been searching for this for long time, and eventually I even gave up searching for it... Finally I'll be making my own info-graphics :)
Thanks. You should be able to make some great infographics with these tools. :)
Wel, yeah I'm looking forward some cool topic to make my infographics with these tools
I really like this ...!
this post contain a comprehensive information
I can't wait until this infographic trend dies. I am so sick of seeing them...except on The Onion.
Infographic trend? Information design is a way for people to faster understand information. It is a science on its own... No one forces you to look, like or even learn with any of them. What you can say about «trends» is that the information is supposed to be clear, to lead to knowledge, but sometimes it feels that the product itself hasn't been very well produced. I am a communication designer, and, at university, this was one of my best projects.
I really like info graphics. Thanks for the resources and tips.
I hope you get some use out of them!
Angela,
Great article and informative. I like Inkscape. It looks like a good program to use. I will have to try it...
Thanks for sharing my article.
Angela,
Great article and informative. I like Inkscape. It looks like a good program to use. I will have to try it...
Thanks for sharing my article.
Thanks - and you're welcome. :)
I've pretty much relied on tools like ConceptDraw and CorelDraw to make vector inforgraphics. I'm glad there are alternatives out there that extend the utility of mainstream tools.
I'm sure you make some great infographics with those tools, though. :)
Love infographics and thanks Angela for this post. The thing with both infographics and PowerPoint slides is that how can you convey the most with the least number of words.
I know. And that's mighty useful when everyone on the internet has the very little attention to give.
chartsbin.com also has lot of statistics in an interactive maps
chartsbin.com also has lot of statistics in an interactive maps
Thanks for adding the link!