How can you make engaging interactive infographics if you’re not a professional graphic designer? In fact, creating this type of visual content can be really easy. You may want a handy reminder about infographics – what are they and when should you use them? This first post in our infographics blog series has the answers.
You don’t need a dedicated development team if you have platforms that speed up and simplify the process of creating interactive content with strong visual elements. There are several easy to learn and use infographic tools available online.
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Canva is a great free tool for creating non-interactive infographics online, with simple functionality. Canva provides many free tools for creating a base image for your infographic:
- Templates and backgrounds, including infographic templates.
- Graphs and charts.
- Different fonts.
- Photos, graphics and animations.
- The ability to save your content in jpg, png or PDF format.
Canva also provide a wide range of free tutorials which cover the complete creation process and will take you from complete beginner to fully-fledged infographic maker!
Checklist for creating an infographic
Let’s suppose you are determined to use infographics to solve your problem. But where do you start? How to make information easy to digest? How to avoid common mistakes? Below we’ll talk about what is essential to know when creating an infographic: this checklist will help you in your work.
- Find a topic that will be useful and interesting to your potential customers or your audience. It will not be difficult if you are really well versed in the information that you are describing. Just interesting facts or statistics, or maybe the whole story – the choice is yours. Draw, write, imagine.
- After you have selected some statistics and information that you would like to display in the infographic, you need to understand what format it is most suitable for. As we’ve mentioned above, there are several types of infographics. Reread that part and choose the one that will be most suitable for your purposes.
- The more data you have, the better. You can not be limited to 1-2 numbers or pictures. No one wants to see unverified or untrustworthy numbers. Give more facts, more convincing, more useful visual material.
- The most challenging part: the “assembly” of the design. It’s better if you have an idea of what format may fit your story. The messages mustn’t contradict each other, and the facts are arranged sequentially. At this stage, it is important not to rush, to consider all possible options for the “location” of the main semantic parts.
- So, you got the finished infographic. Check it out again! Ask colleagues for feedback.
Make static infographics interactive!
For the next level you can turn your static infographic into an interactive experience. For that, you can use ThingLink. ThingLink allows you to create interactive images, videos and 360° pictures. With ThingLink insert informational hotspots – or tags – into your images. The tags can contain text, videos (for example, from Youtube), pictures, and links to other online resources as well as different embeds from other services. Above is a fantastic example of an interactive infographic created in ThingLink by Carmanah Technologies. Read here how they created this and other clear and effective interactive content for product marketing.
ThingLink is a great tool for making your infographics interactive.
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- The interface is intuitive, simple, and easy to use.
- You can share your interactive infographic on social networks or embed it into your blog or website.
- The infographics you create will work great on all modern web browsers as well as oniOS and Android devices.
Did you know?
We perceive information through the senses: vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. With the help of the organs of vision, a person receives about 90% of the information, about 9% with the help of the organs of hearing, and only 1% with the help of the rest of the senses. Based on the above data, we can conclude that information is best perceived visually.
What you need to keep in mind when creating an interactive infographic
Infographics are a powerful current trend that have reached all types of content, from publishing, education and content marketing. But what are infographics in simple words? Here is a very simple definition: infographics are images that convey meaning through graphics, not text. They are a method of data visualization
When creating an interactive infographic, ask yourself a few questions, the answers to which will help you:
- Do the images and interactive elements help to clearly represent your data?
- How well does the design reflect the values and characteristics of your brand, target audience and marketing strategy?
- Where will the interactive graphic live? If it is hosted on your site, you might want the design to fit the overall style of the site.
How to determine whether the work in question is an infographic or not is simple enough. Remove all the text from it and see if the remaining image conveys any meaning, or is it simply and eye-catching and decorative element? If you have a meaningless image left in front of you – you are presented with a standard illustration. If the meaning remains, you are dealing with an example of infographics.
Your task is to help the reader understand the topic better. The following recommendations will help:
- Decide on an idea, simplify it. Then come back and simplify again.
- Use only the most essential and exciting information. There should not be too much text.
- Try out the tools we’ve mentioned. Canva can be used to create the base image, and ThingLink will help you make your infographic truly interactive.
- Look at the finished chart to see if your audience understands it. If not, redo it.
Looking for more inspiration?
In the next blog in our series on infographics we look at the best interactive infographic examples in ThingLink which will inspire you. Or why not look next at how to create an interactive map with ThingLink?
This blog is based on the article Infographics: What are they and how to use them at work and in everyday life by Alexey Solomatin, Head of Product at ThingLink