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Infographic is in vogue if you judge by famous blogs that publish infographics every week.
Often creative infographics feature online magazine reviews and analyses. Public warmly supports original infographics for fine design, well-structured content and clearly delivered ideas. At the same time, publishers benefit from the frequent use of infographics in posts. It’s a good way to show statistics, display a research summary or complex notions. There are no boring numbers. Instead, infographics praise design aesthetics and beauty. That’s why people love to share infographics, save and email them to friends.
Nowadays you can find infographics samples for almost each industry: games, social media, web design, iPhone apps, software, etc. Infographics is a perfect tool to unleash your design talent, get inspiration and master your skills. But when it comes to infographics creation routine, there are a few stumbling blocks which you’d better escape in order to make a successful image.
Let’s look at common mistakes when you create your first infographics:
Make me-too infographics
Each infographics slide on top websites has thousands of tweets, likes and LinkedIn shares. It is engaging and interesting content that goes viral. So you think you need to create an infographics too. Don’t you want to have dozens of tweets next to your infographics? Probably it’s the point you should abandon your idea. If you create an infographics just because everyone makes it, your masterpiece may fail quickly and leave your completely disappointed. If you start making an infographics with no goals you are likely to finish nowhere.
Instead of investing hours and dollars into the infographics, first evaluate if you need it and why do you want to get from it. The goals may be brand-building, personal promotion as a designer, traffic, link back generation etc. Each goal requires different promotion tactics, so be ready in advance and invent a good marketing campaign for your infographics.
Each highly viral infographics is the result of hard work of the team: designers, a copywriter, a researcher, marketing and PR people. If you lack some of these skills, you should hire a freelancer for a certain task. Don’t forget you have to allocate resources for research, content, design, and promotion. Thus, the infograhics may cost up to 2000 USD per one picture.
One more important aspect you should take into consideration is the number of similar images on the topic you plan to cover. If there are already many pictures, probably you should change the topic of your infographics or cast the light upon the topic from another side. Otherwise, it will be a really tough task to invent something new to attract attention of bloggers and public.
Select wrong infographics focus
There are 2 extremes you should avoid while preparing your infographics: concentrate the infographics solely on your product/company or make an unrelated infographics to your business. Both these ways lead to deadlock.
On the one hand, if you develop an infographics that describes your personal success or a product, the chances are high that people will not be interested in the distribution of your image. Well, if you reveal internal Facebook or Apple secrets, online magazines will publish your infographics. In other cases, chances on success are scanty. When you examine popular infographics, you can see that each slide has broad topic, rather than one-company centric. Such types of infographics explain complicated things, provide comparisons and sort statistics rather than give one-angle opinion.
On the other hand, if you create an infographics that has no connection to your work, people will have less trust in it. Or they will enjoy the infographics but do not convert into your users/customers. For instance, if a person issues an infographics about illustration techniques, we all expect this company/person have some knowledge in the field. Thus, a successful infographics should be related to your interest area, and at the same time it should be broader than a company facts sheet.
Use biased data for infographics
Public tends to trust infographics and the numbers given on image are assumed as is. However, if you plan to publish your image in famous online blogs or magazines, you shall check all data twice and make sure you use well-know data sources. It’s a good sign to list your resources at the bottom of your infographics. So any person can check that you display correct unbiased statistics and facts. Since the infographic is combination of information and design, reliable data resources stated on the infographics are taken into account.
Make ugly infographics
Design is 50% of infographics success. A beautiful layout, well-balanced colors, attractive images, good typo wrapped in one picture is what infographics all about. People will be glad to share and save astonishing images. But if you look at infographics catalogs, it seems that many designers forget about the design part. The common design mistakes are:
a) bad proportions (a too big or a too small image);
b) a huge landscape-oriented image that is too hard to embed on an average blog;
c) small unreadable text with exotic fonts;
d) an image stuffed with numbers that cover almost all surface;
e) tons of numbers and lack of descriptions. Each number requires a little explanation so peopleunderstand it quickly without doubts;
f) lots of arguments and few numbers.
Obviously, an unusual infographics size and shape will attract attention. But if it’s hard to integrate the slide into a blog or a media resource, your unique infographics will stay solely on your site.
Here are top 5 design tips for a creative and user-friendly infographics that is destined to the success:
1. If you show a lot of stats in your image, let people easily read it.
2. Try proper forms: a table, a graph, a pie chart or a numbers net.
3. Choose a readable font size and color.
4. Don’t stuff your image with too little letters. No one wants to digest new information with a magnifying glass.
5. Eliminate additional distraction and help people to glide through meaningful data.
When you design infographics you should keep in mind that an infographics provides facts, numbers and little hints for each object. However, it should leave some space for journalist to develop a story around the image you give. Thus, keep good balance between facts and numbers, so users can get the main idea at first glimpse and bloggers may tell a story with the support of your image.
Do not let users share your infographics
Let’s assume you have made a perfect exciting infographics, there is one more step to success – sharing. Surely, everyone can just grab an image from your site and save it on a hard-drive, or drop a link in Twitter. But if you plan a bright future for your image, think about sharing options that you can offer for your site visitors. There are simple and efficient things you may try.
First of all, create an embed code that anyone can copy and paste into an ordinary WordPress or Tumblr blog. You can see an example of embed code at YouTube Killed TV infographics that gained over 450 tweets!
Then, add tweet, Like, LinkedIn and +1 buttons, so your user can distribute your image in their favorite social media channels. Next, think about special sharing options if they are highly close to your product like: Reddit, Stumble or Pinterest. Plus, you can destroy sharing limits and place a universal sharing plug-in like addthis, so all visitors will have a chance to exchange the infographics in local networks. One more thing, you should clearly state that you allow everyone to copy and post your image, or write additional requirements for infographics publishers.
Do not promote your infographics
As we agreed above, a successful infographics is a result of mutual work of many people. Thus, you should cross-promote your infographics in all communication channels you have. Your message about the infographics should be repeated several times so it reaches the maximum of your audience. If you have Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon accounts, don’t forget to mention it there and ask your current fans to distribute it. One more solution is to go ahead and prepare a press release and a complete blog post with thorough analysis of all facts that are displayed at your infographics. Then, remember to get in touch with all public opinion influencers like bloggers, editors or experts and share your infographics with them. One more way is to upload your infographics to dedicated online catalogs like visual.ly.
Upon the whole, good infographics requires a lot of inspiration, design talent and hard work. What is your opinion on infographics? Share your recipe of a creative infographics at comments!
