10 Tips for Designing Better Infographics

Create One Strong Focal Point Infographics too often turn into a complicated mess of graphics and text. As a designer, it’s very easy to get carried away and ultimately come away with something that’s more overwhelming than helpful. One way to reign this tendency is to rely heavily on one central graphic that strongly communicates your overall theme or message:

As you can see, the main corn graphic here is by no means the only attractive visual on the page, but it does eat up most of the available space. This helps pull you in and gives you the sense that you can easily digest the information depicted. Once the main graphic has pulled you in, you can then choose to move your attention to the flanking information, graphics and textual information.

Can You Read it at a Glance? Remember that, just like any design, an infographic should have a set of underlying goals that it is meant to accomplish. Typically, the point of an infographic is to take complex information and make it easier to take in through graphical reinforcement. Your goal then is to create something that can be consumed as quickly as possible. Not every little scrap of information needs to be communicated in an instant, but the overall gist of the data should at least be perceivable in under a few seconds. If you don’t keep your eye closely on this goal, it’s easy to miss the mark. The result is something might be a small improvement over raw text, but fails to truly present the data in an engaging and easily consumable manner.

I can’t help but think that this infographic is unnecessarily difficult to sort through. As you design, think about the number of eye movements it takes to take in a data point. In the example above, you’re eyes are darting all over the place to decipher the layout on the horizontal point on the grid, the vertical point on the grid, the colors and how they all tie in together. Simply put, it’s too much work! Use Applicable Metaphors Some of the most engaging infographics take boring, complex information and apply a graphical metaphor that’s so perfect that even laymen can almost instantly understand what is being stated. The infographic below serves as an excellent example. The designers were tasked with communicating fifty quarters of comparative positive economic growth among 14 countries. In a plain old chart, this is enough to put any high school student to sleep. However, with the race metaphor, it’s an entertaining, conversation starting graphic that even an elementary school student can grasp on a basic level.

As another example, take a look at the graphic below. Here the influx of immigrants into the United States is depicted as a series of bar charts that make up the American flag. It’s a quick read that’s made that much more engaging by the familiarization of the data’s shape.

Take a Slice Sometimes infographics aren’t merely used to jazz up raw data points but to communicate a real world situation. Under these circumstances, one popular go-to strategy is to illustrate a scene using three dimensional graphics that almost look like a scientific sample has been taken from the world similar to how a scientist would sample a tree.

As you can see, the result of this technique is a remarkably interesting illustration that very quickly relates the issue. What would typically take several paragraphs or even pages to explain is condensed down to one helpful graphic.

Data Can Be Beautiful Sometimes infographics take a handful of data points and put them together for a quicker read, other times the point is to visualize a huge mound of data. In these situations, it’s simply not always a realistic or even desirable to make each individual point an area of interest. Instead, the big picture is the primary focus: What can we learn from taking a step back to take in the data all at once? In these circumstances, designers often creatively plot the data in such a way that a beautiful piece of art results!

Rethink the Bar Graph The designer who taught me most of what I know told me something that has always stuck with me: “Your first idea is probably your most generic.” In design, it’s likely the case that the first thing that pops into your head is the first thing that would pop into another designer’s head as well, which isn’t always bad but can lead to a lot of unoriginal work. In infographics this concept frequently takes the form of a bar graph. Sure, it’s an incredibly useful tool that genuinely improves data visualization, but it’s also a bit generic and unimaginative from a design perspective. The next time you start to create a bar chart, think about how you can put your own unique spin on it. The infographic below is a perfect example. Here the designer used 3D stacks of cards to depict Americans’ opinions of their allies. The higher the stack, the more favorable the opinion. At heart, it’s just a bar graph but in practice it made for a much more interesting graphic.

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Verbeter je ranking in zoekmachines m.b.v. infographics

What is an Infographic? An infographic is a pictorial representation of specific data or knowledge. Infographics can be a great way to showcase information on a particular subject area and can prove to be a good source of link value. Infographics have the ability to transform plain material into interesting and exciting web content. Over the past few years the value of infographics has grown tremendously because many have begun to recognize the potential they have to connect with their target audience.

Link value or link juice is a term often used in Search Engine Optimization and refers to the amount of value that the search engines like Google attribute to a website or link. Link juice is assigned to web pages and is dispersed throughout a website based on how well your website is optimized. The more links and most importantly the more high quality links a website has directly translates into the more link juice a website is likely to have.

When talking about Links it is important to understand some important fundamentals. Total links quantity indicates the total number of links that your website or webpage possesses. The merit of these links can vary which brings us to the linking source. The linking source describes who is linking to your content and how credible or trustworthy they are. The sites that have a higher rank will pass on more value than those with a lower web rank. Even though the websites with a higher rank may provide more value it is also important to have diversity among your links. It’s ok to have links from lower ranked pages as long as there is a balance between link values.

Another major factor with links is anchor text. The anchor text is the keywords and descriptions other websites use when linking to your content. Accurate anchor text is essential for good SEO. You want something that describes your content well and not something like “Click here”. The visible text for a link or the anchor text should include the source and a short description of the linked content, for example when linking to the Internet Beacon’s blog it should look something like Internet Beacon’s SEO Blog.

Methods of obtaining link value include submitting your articles to article directories, submitting your website to high quality directories, participating in forums or online communities, commenting on blogs, participating in social media, linking to your other online profiles, submitting to RSS feeds, and successfully linking your internal webpages. One of the easiest and more effortless methods of acquiring link juice is creating valuable and link worthy content on your website. Link worthy content is commonly called linkbait because of its ability to attract links from other websites. Although creating amazing content or Linkbait may take some effort it is the content that typically does the heavy lifting in gathering link juice. This is why infographics have become a major tool when it comes to attracting an audience and obtaining links.

Linkbait isn’t only infographics but can also be content or resources like tutorials, tools, how to guides, top 100 lists, or basically any resource that serves a specific niche. This type of content, when discovered is often linked to and can appoint you or your site as an industry authority. Content like infographics is easy to understand and neatly groups information in easy to digest bites. A successful infographic will entice others to link to it whether they link it to their website or in a blog article, either way the websites that are linked to your content are providing more links and with that, more value.

Infographics have a reputation of being able to quickly spread across the internet which is why they are great for SEO. Infographics may spread fast and be an easy method of gathering link value but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things you can do to improve their SEO benefits. Below are some ways to integrate SEO into your infographics and build successful links.

- Use targeted Keywords in your infographic’s title
- Make the infographic relevant and industry specific
- Submit it to web and article directories
- Submit it to social media sites
- Add social media and share icons to the page so visitors can quickly share their findings
- Link to the infographic from your other internal pages
- Use word of mouth to other industry professionals.

Hopefully, being creative with your content and using these search engine optimization methods for infographics can help you to see an increase in your link value!

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Koffieconsumptie in Nederland

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Infographic - De kans op een vliegtuigongelukken

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