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.

data > informatie > visualisatie > illustratie > infographic