So what are infographics? You may have heard this term before as it’s something that comes up quite a lot within digital marketing. You may have even seen some examples before. They are the combination of data visualizations, illustrations, and text used to communicated a specific topic. The term infographics used to be used synonymously with data visualization, but its use in content marketing has given it a more specific meaning now. In this video we’re going to walk through the four things that successful infographics do.
Tell A Story
First is, Tell a story. Consumers get more emotionally invested in a subject when they can hear a story. And that story narrative can do an affective job of pulling a reader through the story.
As we look at the infographic on the right, notice how this story of an animal foster parent and her pet is told in narrative fashion. We can literally follow the red path through their story and we arrive at the most important detail of the story, the outcome of the fostering process and how the reader can get involved. Overall, the story should be simple and easy to follow.
This infographic fails on both the simple and the easy to follow. Your eye does not know where to begin reading and it’s a bit of a visual jumble.
Put Info First
We also want to Put Info First. The information or data of your infographic should be the most important element. Design should always take a back seat to the content. If you’re going to tell a story, and you should, then the narrative should be structured with your information.
You shouldn’t create an arbitrary structure and try and fit the data to it. Notice at the bottom of this infographic how the source of the data is given and actual details about how the data was generated. It’s always a good idea to cite your sources.
This example is probably one of the worst offenders in terms of not putting the information first. Not only is the actual content minimized, is so visually confusing it’s difficult to interpret as well. It’s certainly clever from a design standpoint, but is this really serving the data or is the data serving the design?
Make It Visually Engaging
Your building an infographic. Of course you want the design to be done well. You want to ensure that you’re using design best practices. Thinking through the color theory. Ensuring the best usage of typography. Giving the readers eyes room to digest information be providing adequate white space.
That’s what makes this example so bad. The colors don’t work well. A mustard yellow background? Really? Green titles? There’s no white space. The text is dense and line spacing too tight. This really is a mess to look at. And what do these design choices have to do with the story or content being discussed. Overall, the design is just incoherent.
Contrast that with this design. Everything is well-organized. The use of color and typology help with communication rather than hinder.
Facilitate Sharing
Finally, infographics are an important communication vehicle on the internet and their popularity has exploded with the proliferation of content marketing. If you’re trying to get your message out—and you should be—then you need to provide your readers and easy mechanism for sharing your infographic. Utilize the technology you have available to you to help the reader share your infographic using whatever social media or communications platform you can.
To recap, your infographics should tell a story. Stories make your message easier to remember. You need to Put Info First. Design should always take a back seat to your actual information and data. Make your infographic engaging. Your design should be visually coherent and follow design best practices. And you should facilitate sharing. Help your readers spread your message as far and wide.