Babies can now read infographics.
Just this week, I did a presentation about media rationale for a the National Art Gallery, with supporting details and all. However, my prof informed my teammates and I that our presentation was actually really ugly. We included screenshots of our raw data to rationalize our reach for a certain target audience. She told us that we definitely would not actually present that kind of stuff to a client. They will usually not understand raw data, and will get bored very easily if there aren't pretty pictures, and a
re-processed version of the data into pretty pictures.
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Vividata, 2017 Q2 Readership and Product Database (online)
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Alas, infographics.
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My Modern Met, 2017
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So I decided to Google how to make one. Here is a summary of the article I read on CoSchedule Blog. Ashton Hauff, the author of the article tells us that infographics are the easiest ways of digesting information, also ranked the highest ranked shareable content type; they are 30x more likely to be read and digested than an article composed of purely text.
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Step 1: Find A Topic
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Define the goal of the project with questions. "What?" and "why?" are the crucial ones. Some additional ones that will help are:
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What are people asking about?
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What problem does my audience have?
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What current ideas could be better explored and communicated?
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These questions will help you finf d a specific topic and engage your audience as well.
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Step 2: Gather Information
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Now that we have a solid topic, we need to do the research to support it. Find everything you can about the topic beginning with the largest resources, then narrow it down to niche and small bits and pieces. Look for numbers because statistics there is finally a way to digest stats easily! They hold a lot of value in your research, and your audience will be able to understand it comfortably. We also need to find a theme, a consistent message or story to make the entire infographic cohesive and help tell the story alongside the numbers.
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Here, we have a template for a rain themed infographic.
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Presentation Go, the free PowerPoint Library
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Step 3: Visual Inspiration
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Now that we've collected our stats and numbers, it's time to make our infographic pretty!
Some suggestions to begin your search for visuals:
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Some good questions to ask you while you're looking for visuals:
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What chart formats are currently working really well?
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How are others telling the story?
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What styles are you drawn to?
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What infographics do your readers enjoy?
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Remember, the purpose of getting visual inspiration is to prepare your brain for the creative aspects of your infographic, not to simply collect and copy everything you see.
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Step 4: Designing your Infographic
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There are two options here. You can either create it yourself, or you can outsource it (if you don't have time or design experience).
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If you're creating it yourself, you'll want to start with looking at some tools to help.
Some well known tools to begin with are:
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Choosing a colour scheme means asking the questions: "What mood do I want to represent in my infographic?", and then finding a colour palette to match it. The general guideline for infographics is three main colours throughout, then two accent colours, totalling five colours for consistency and clarity.
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Select key points to highlight to find your key subtopics. We want to display them slightly differently than the rest of your information. This is called visual hierarchy. Once your topics are distinguished, begin adding more supporting information. Titles, dividing your information into those subtopics.
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Step 5: A call to action & crediting
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Once your readers are about finished with reading the information, what and where is their way out? What should they do next? What should they do with that information?
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Finally, remember to credit your sources.
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Step 6: Publish!
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Be sure to use a social media size guide for all the different social media sites you're posting on to ensure the best quality is going out, and optimize your engagement with the best times to share.
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I'm actually quite excited to make my own. I've always found infographics very interesting, so clever and so engaging. This guide from CoSchedule was very informative and provided many resources. I didn't realize so much information is shared through infographics. It's like, the basis of any presentation now. I bet babies can read them now too.
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Be sure to check back for more posts! And follow me on my social media sites to keep up with me:
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Instagram: @nikitacekay
Twitter: @nikitacekay
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Have a great week guys because I'm suffering and I need sun.
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Nikita
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