How to Make Awesome Infographics for Your Blog

While browsing through your social media account, chances are you often stumble upon striking content material which displays information and data with the help of colorful charts, icons, images, and expressive fonts. This piece of content is known as an infographic, breaking this term down can help one understand this term easier. 

Information presented with the help of graphic aid to present facts and knowledge, turning dry and monotonous words to engaging and eye-catching visualizations is the mission of infographics. Multinational companies today hold full faith in the power of customized infographics. For example, Intercom, an AI chatbot company, makes use of quirky and innovative illustrations to highlight youth and amusement as the core values of their spirit.

You may recall them from when your professor used them in class to present a timeline of facts about the history of Apple Inc. or when your boss presented the monthly statistics of the profits made by your firm through a PowerPoint presentation. As per Xerox, people’s motivation to select a piece of content is governed by colors and hence black and white font seems less engaging. They also point out that the use of colored graphics can increase sales by up to 80%. Not only do infographics grab viewers' attention, but they also help to learn and memorize the presented information with a lot of ease and clarity. For this exact purpose, bloggers must utilize this aid in their articles. 

However, they may often find themselves perplexed regarding how to go about it and which type of infographic shall fulfill their purpose. This article is your pocket guide to steps involved in creating awesome infographics, specific to the purpose of your blog. We shall also look into the tools that can help you design these infographics without much hassle. 

Designing Infographics From Scratch

Now that you have some information about the importance and benefits of infographics, the next step involves learning to design this aid. If you hold the perception that infographics designing is specifically for professionals and is not something that can be done by a person with no background in visual designing, it may come as a shock to you that it in fact is quite easy. In this section, we have broken down the process into five simple steps involved in designing infographics.

Step 1 - Establish Clear Motives

Every masterpiece begins with an idea. To begin with, a blogger must brainstorm with their marketing and creative teams to select an appropriate idea to work upon from an array of ideas. For this, allow free flow of suggestions and work towards creating a pool of 5-6 topics. Upon further research, discussions, and debates, finalize a particular topic for which the infographic is to be designed. This topic must be of greater importance and urgency than the other options in sight. 

Once a topic has been selected, its target audience is decided. The key idea is to please and cater to a particular group of people and not all. The particular reason behind this is the fact that specific infographics interest a specific set of people and unspecific infographics interest no one in specific, i.e., they do not have a definite target audience and hence can be overlooked. This also helps in providing clarity about the overall style of the infographic and whether specific jargon and nomenclature can be included in the infographic or not. 

Confused about your target audience? Ask yourself the following two questions:

1. What is the occupation of my target audience?

An infographic that is targeted at managers will be very different from that which is targeted at students. A manager may have a higher level of expertise in a particular field as compared to a student with no work experience at all. It is thus important to know the occupational background of your target audience.

2. What is the level of intellect or expertise of my target audience?

When you are aware that your target audience primarily comprises students then you can avoid the usage of technical jargon in your infographic and focus on more basic information. On the other hand, if your target audience includes specialized individuals, you may easily skip over the unnecessary base-level knowledge and include more nomenclature.

Step 2 - Collect and Compile Data/Content for the Infographic

The next step involves gathering data that is in line with your motives behind the creation of the infographic. This step can be especially confusing for a lot of people as there is no dearth of information online or elsewhere. To scan through such vast amounts of information to pick up only the necessary ones can be extremely time-consuming and challenging. To avoid such a situation, begin with scanning your blog for key pointers such as data analytics, sales, etc. 

Next, try and narrow down the essence of elaborate essays to form bullet points that can go on your infographic. At the end of this process, you will ideally be left with precise points and pieces of information that can directly go onto your infographic.

Step 3 - Derive Inspiration from Similar Works

Now, you may be thinking that this is similar to copying others’ ideas and that it is unethical. However, looking for inspiration does not mean picking up exactly what you are presented with. By having a look at previously published infographic works by bloggers who are tackling the same topics as you may be, you can learn new ways to present their data with your hint of magic. 

Step 4 - Roughly Visualize the Data Presentation 

The next step is to plan out the structure of your infographic. The following points can be considered before you finally pan out your infographic:

Information hierarchy: Type out the information that will go onto the final infographic on a word document according to importance. The trick is to present the most important information at the beginning of your infographic and the least at the end.

Selecting the right template or creating a new template: For this, you may use free apps (which will be mentioned at the end of this article) or take the help of an infographics creation service.

Color pallet: Choosing the right color pallet is necessary to attract viewers’ attention. Choose colors that comply with the color scheme of your blog. For instance, if you are a food blogger then a color pallet of reds should be a part of your infographic as it is the color that aggravates hunger in people, according to color psychology.

Choice of the font: The font choice for headers should be bold and enlarged in size while the rest of the content can be small.

Step 5 - Put It Together

This final step includes jotting down the finalized information and data onto the selected template. You can finish it up by adding additional and relevant images and icons.

Use Infographics Specific To Your Blog Category

Infographics contribute a great deal to different industries and sectors – Education, Marketing, News and Mass Media Communication, Business, etc. Since the users come from a plethora of industries and sectors, there exists a wide variety of infographics that enables people to select the most accurate infographic that will help them meet their goals. Specific categories of infographics do a fine job of delivering specific data or information.

Although there exist over 13 different types of infographics, for the purpose of this article we will be looking into the five most popular categories of infographics.

Informational Infographics

If you wish to present information in the form of text then informational infographics should be your choice. These infographics make use of descriptive messages and do not rely upon graphs or other diagrammatic representations. A typical informational infographic is divided into multiple headers or bullet points. However, it is important to note that these headers are crisp and precise and not lengthy and boring to read. This type of infographic is particularly great to present novel ideas and content and is one of the most popular forms of infographics that many companies adopt. For instance, if you have an e-Learning or a writing blog, you may consider making informational infographics a part of your website. 

Statistical Infographics

Do you want to use statistical tools like pie charts, bar graphs, or histograms to bring life to the boring numbers presented in the form of texts on your blog? Use statistical infographics. These infographics showcase data in interesting visually appealing ways that make the comprehension of confusing data a lot easier. With these types of infographics, all it takes is a quick glance to understand complex data. Additionally, they are especially attractive as they make use of shapes and figures. If you are a health blogger, for instance, make use of this tactic to gain a competitive advantage by presenting surveys on vegetarian, non-vegetarian, and vegan populations in the form of pie charts. 

Comparison Infographics

As the name may suggest, this type of infographic is used when making comparisons amongst two or more options within a category. Typically, this is presented by dividing the page into equal sections, either vertically or horizontally, amongst the options. The information is then noted down side by side in the form of short phrases or bullet points. 

For example, if you are to do a comparative analysis between the features of two different laptops, you can make use of comparison infographics.

Timeline Infographics

Timeline Infographics help trace the history of a topic or thing in a visual manner. They highlight the birth, important developments, dates, etc. about the same. This is a great way to easily trace the historical beginning and development of a company or anything else. 

We tend to understand time spatially and thus using a visual aid that helps create a clearer image of a timeframe can facilitate understanding and thus learning. 

For instance, if you wish to visualize the conception and growth of a company like Apple Inc., you may adopt timeline infographics for the same. 

Process Infographics

Ever came across How-To Guides or Step-By-Step guides to bake a cake or build a dog house from scratch at home? These are all examples of process infographics. Process infographics summarize the steps involved in a process. They work as instructional guides to help you accomplish tasks without having to go through paragraphs and paragraphs of information.

Tools to Make Awesome Infographics

According to Forbes, 74% of marketers rely on infographics and other visual aid to establish their credibility and create brand awareness. As demand creates supply, the players within the infographic creation apps and services have significantly rocketed over the years. 

With more competition comes greater confusion for the customers of these tools. Making a choice from the available plethora of infographic designing tools can be puzzling. We have made you a list of the best and most popular infographic creation tools to help you make a decision. 

• Adobe Creative Cloud Express
• Canva Infographic Tool
• Venngage, Inc.
• Piktochart
• Snappa
• DesignCap
• Visme
• Infogram

Human beings are naturally more inclined towards things that satisfy their aesthetic needs and please their eyes. This is why the field of creative design has been flourishing over the last decade or so. Additionally, infographics help in Search Engine Optimization thus improving the ranking of your blog on a search engine results page. Content that makes use of images and visuals gets 94% more views than content that does not do so. They also bring in a sense of universality making it bias-free of specific geographic regions or cultures. People from all over the world are drawn to visual content alike. 

Conclusion

This article delved deep into the world of infographics. We started off with a pocket guide to help you create your own infographics with five easy steps. We then looked into the various types of infographics that you may choose from depending on the goals of your blog and your target audience. Lastly, we provided you with a list of the best and most popular infographic designing tools and aids. We hope this article helped you learn the process of making awesome infographics for your blog.