How to Design an Infographic. The Theoretical Part.

Perhaps the most interesting part is that there shouldn’t have to be a competition between Infographics and Presentations (visual formats) as long as you know how to “redesign” them in order to get the most out of them.

For example, when I made the infographic on “The Art of Evangelism” and I put it on the blog I thought that maybe it would be best that I upload it in another format on Slideshare, so I redesigned it in a presentation (this way I even managed to get on Slideshare’s homepage).

But why should we make infographics? How should we make them? Who should make them? Where do we even start designing? How can we promote them? What information should they contain? All this are questions that you might have had one day when you wanted to start making this type of content and maybe at some point you gave up on the idea and left it in the pile of folders, paper and tasks. So let me try to rekindle your desire to give infographics a shot.

My idea is to start a series of two articles on how to make an infographic divided into two main parts: the theoretical part and the practical part. Today we will be talking about the theoretical part:

1. Why?

It’s the question I was telling you about above, a question that helps you understand the purpose of this content. Eventually you have to honestly answer the following question: Why do you want to make an infographic? Because this is the trend now? Because you’ve read about it on some marketing blog? Because all the big companies do it? Because your fans might appreciate this type of content? Because the message you want to put into this format will have a better chance of reaching the public? Because you want to differentiate yourself from the competition? See how many answers you can find 🙂

So, before we get to the next point, give yourself a minute to think about what why you want to make an infographic?

2. Dates and Statistics

We know that infographics have managed to “dress” these two terms so good that today anyone could understand what’s it all about when looking at these visuals. Of course, if we assume that we have enough dates and statistics and we can just “throw them” into an infographic and be done, then we have a big problem.

Make the dates and statistics that you already have into a story worth sharing with the world. Moreover, maybe your dates and statistics won’t be enough, so you can also search somewhere else and find resources that might complement your infographic’s story.

Stay away from the infographics with too many numbers and too much text. Here’s an example of How not to.

3. Be Fresh

I had two things in mind when I came up with this point:

1. Imagine that you only have a few seconds to capture the reader’s attention and if you don’t work good (and smart) enough for this format you might end up investing resources that might not be recovered afterwords.
2. You have to take into account the fact that you’re not the only one on the market that wants to make an infographic at this moment.

How useful is the information of your infographic? How fresh is the story told by you? How will this help the person who’s gonna see your content?

4. Branding

If you follow Quicksprout you will notice that Neil Patel posts infographics about digital marketing quite often. And if you’d start studying the infographics you might notice a beautiful branding in color, font, the format of the infographic, in the footer (a good practice is to have a footer to show where the infographic comes from and what other references it containsl) . You can study the following examples:

• How to Turn Pinterest into a Revenue Generating Channel
• How Much Copy Should You Write on Your Homepage?
• How to Boost Your Revenue Through Upselling and Cross Selling
• The Ultimate Guide to Creating Visually Appealing Content

Pay attention though not to stick too much branding in the design.

5. Where is the infographic’s house?

And after finishing it, where you upload it? Some companies choose to make a new blog post with the infographic (via Quicksprout) and others to create a separate page on their blog (via Kissmetrics). Other companies prefer to just upload it on different social media channels: Pinterest (you can follow my Visual Storytelling board) and / or Slideshare.

Be careful not to upload your infographic to Facebook because it will just look bad (I recommend making a banner that would promote the “official housing” of the infographici).

You can also create an account on Visual.ly and upload it there (with the possibility of sharing).

The good part of uploading an infographic on your personal website / blog is that you can provide an Embed Code for those who want to use your infographic and this way you can follow “the activity” of your content.

Additionally, I also recommend making a Pinterest Button (WordPress Plugin) to give the reader the possibility to Pin it directly on his social media channel.

6. Advertising Strategy

Now that you have determined the reason you’re making an infographic, what the story of the statistics is, how are you going to use branding and which is the house of the infographic it’s time to start talking about your promotion strategy. Why? Because it is a resource in which you have invested money and you do not want it to get lost in the pile of daily online content.

Do the math and see how much money are you willing to spend for the promotion of the infographic, because simply sharing it on social networks won’t bring you more followers or fans.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much how you “design” an infographic in theory. Next time we’ll talk about the skeleton of an infographic, what headline to use, how to present the information, what items to use, dimensions and other details that can help you.