Put infographics easily on your blog

What is an infograhpic?

In simple terms, an infographic is presentation of information in image form.

Making infographics is as easy as drag and drop,
on Canva, etc

Infographics are seen on blogs, social networks, product sites, presentations, research journals, almost everywhere. 

Infographics come handy in presenting data in visual form. They can visualize data in many forms, the common ones being: graphs / time series / data on maps / tree-maps / networks / flowcharts / simple graphic-text visualisations.

But, if not created intelligently, they can look childish and will not serve the purpose of making the information easily understood.

In this post, we’d briefly talk about the importance of infographics in blogs, and then how to make professional-looking infographics.

Why infographics on blogs?

• Infographics break monotony of text content. As with other visual elements, infographics give relief to eyes.
• They draw instant attention to facts. Without an accompanying infographic, the viewer might miss the data you want him to look at.
• They visualize facts for the viewer. Remember how sketches helped you visualize the adventures of Alice in the wonderland.
• They serve to highlight important aspects of information. Whether standalone or supplementing text, infographics help the reader focus on the most important aspects of the subject. Within data, visual presentation makes the reader make immediate comparisons, e.g. a small circle representing your startup’s revenue next to a huge circle representing General Electric’s income would instantly show how small you are, financially speaking.
• Infographics make it easy to understand trends and comparisons. The infographic will tend to be complex if the data is complex, but beauty lies in making infographics easy to understand.
• Infographics help in understanding information sequentially from general to specific or simple to complex. You can make different modules within a big infographic, first showing the broad picture and then going to details, helping the viewer grasp the data more easily.

When to put infographics on the blog?

If your blog discusses financial, demographic or such other topics that can be explained better with the help of a visual, think of infographics. Some examples could be – travel across countries (Show and briefly describe locations on a map.), evolution of something (Evolution of a car: show different versions with timelines.), progression over time (A graph of population / national incomes / cholesterol levels over a lifetime / reduction in crimes), distribution across geographies (Alcoholism across Europe: colour different nations according to the prevalence of alcoholism.), and so on.

You can think of infographics also to explain things visually with the help of an image and explanatory text. (Puritans would not like to call such simple presentations as infographics, but we would.) For example, you can take a series of shots of how a sweater is knit and then make one image out of it, with small text to explain the steps. Similarly, you could explain the parts of a machine using a photo of that machine and explain it with lines, circles and labels.

You can use infographics to supplement the main content of the post or can even have a post with just a long infographic.

Take care that the infographic is not too wordy / too cluttered, and is not confusing. Colours in the infographic should be chosen with care so that the final product does not look childish. Text should generally not be too colourful. The text must be in a clear font and of right size so that it is highly readable. The final product must look professional. The file size should ideally not be too big.

How to make infographics easily?

You can make infographics using any image editor (Photoshop, Gimp) or presentation tools (MS Powerpoint), but the easiest way would be to use tools specifically designed for making infographics. 

We introduce you to three websites that offer such tools online and free. There are many more, some only for making charts out of data and some embed their name when you create a free infographic, and so we have excluded them.

Canva. We introduced this fine graphic maker earlier. It can be used for making high-quality infographics, and with ease. You can choose from a number of free templates and either use their free images or upload your own images, drop and drag the elements, colour them, rotate them, write whatever you want, and the infographic is ready! 

Easel.ly. This is another site that offers online infographic creation. It has, like Canva, free templates (called vhemes) to choose from. 

Piktochart. This too has themes like the other two. The standard (free) account has enough resources for bloggers and other users.

These online tools are free and naturally have some limitations, but their paid versions have many more  resources and freedom to customize (Easel.ly is totally free).