Monday, February 25, 2013

Infographics

Infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly.

They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends. The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualization, information design, or information architecture.  (Wikipedia)


Basic Rules:
  1. Show the design through data visualization which depicts a story. 
  2. Make your design appealing to the senses, each part within, must be integrated with the parent design.
  3. Use a vector software to create your design, keep the graphics and text layers separately
  4. Always consider to style your infographics with icons and graphics depicting the theme.
  5. Avoid relying too much on typography, show different ways of depicting numbers and numeric signs like plus, minus or percentage. Use basic features like creative pie charts, bar graphs.
  6. Use typography for headings and titles, to grasp attention. 
  7. Break your data into meaningful headings via strong and catchy titles, supporting different parts of your info graphics. 
How to start designing:
  1. Prototyping the infographic is the best way to start. Break you data into meaningful layout and start doing the paper sketch. Visualize as you are putting the sketch and fill pencil colors into your data to see how the concept is building up. This will save you lot of time, to realign your mistakes.
  2. Start with the beginning concept, the middle information and the ending concept, this will open up a meaningful insight for the user.
  3. Identify each section of your infographic with a different color breaks. Avoid repetitious design.
  4. Make sure to highlight the "key take away" of your infographic as the center of attraction, as this is what the user is looking for. Make sure the "key take away" becomes the center part of your graphic.
  5. Avoid using dark colors or typical gradients with glow effects. Also try "not to use" typical white backgrounds,which might fail to address the starting and the ending point of your graphic. 
  6. Stick to a three color palette, make the lightest as your background, the other two could depict the content. You can also use lighter tones of your primary colors to fill the other color gaps.
  7. Use the online color picker websites like Adobe Kuler etc. to make your palette.
Content rewritten by Sandeep Virmani
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