How To Create Trending Infographics For Your Blogs
Infographics are visual aids to communicate with your audience. They impart information about whatever you are promoting or writing about in your blog. Infographics reduce the amount of text based content on your blog and make it simpler for people to understand. They give out a large amount of information in an engaging fashion. They are concise, entertaining, and eye-catching. From 2010 to 2012, the use of infographics upped by more than 800%. The uses and superiority of infographics are blatantly clear.
Infographics are superior to other content because they have the power to say so much in so little. They are portable and can be used in multiple places. Infographics also have higher chances of becoming viral since they are more attractive-looking than normal media-based content. Infographics also give you the upper hand in increasing traffic on your blog. They are also great for search engine optimization as their attractiveness and viral capabilities attract people to link their pages to your blog. Many people might also reach out to you to use your infographics. Lastly, these concise bits of graphics show that you know your stuff. They give the impression that you have a deep knowledge of your subject and a good understanding of how things work. With these reasons, infographics are crucial for any successful blog or article. Making one does take practice though.
Here are few tips that will help smoothen out the process for you.
Plan Ahead: Having a clear idea about what you want to promote via your infographics is important. Draw an offline sketch first and include all the assets that you want to use in your design. Jot down a list of information that will be a part of the final result. You can also check out this article from firevista for more tips on sketching. Having a strategy before putting it in action will reduce the time that you will spend on designing. It also gives you a vision and a roadmap that you can use as a boilerplate for all your designs. If your infographic is a part of a series, strategizing is even more important. Decide upon a theme and the content that you wish to promote in each release of the series. Having a design in your head will also help you recognize errors and faults early on. You will also get an idea of the text-based content that will be a part of the design. You can research them early and come up with concise assets to include later.
Color Composition: The first thing that attracts a person to an infographic is its visual appearance and more importantly, the color scheme that you use in your design. Color composition is one of main visual cues that help you rope in more people to your blogs. Use the color wheel and choose colors that complement each other. Avoid colors that are off-putting and colors that can imply something that you don’t want. For instance, if you are posting something about the environment, do not use grey or red colors. These colors do not go well with the theme of nature. Green and blue are more pleasant colors to go with in this case. But if you want to talk about pollution, grey works great. Implied, color composition is dependent on what you want to say to readers on your blog. Use lots of negative white spaces in your design. This keeps it clean and the rest of the important stuff is more clear visually. The information is also easy to read and the message reaches the audience.
Know Your Audience: The content of your blog decides the kind of people who read it. If you write about technical stuff, your readers would usually be technology enthusiasts or professionals with a technical background. Professionals prefer more sophisticated designs that help them understand things in a more structured way. But if your reader community comprises children, for instance, your infographics would be more funky and full of contrasting colors. Knowing your target audience is key and it works both ways. Over time, you collect a group of similar people who love reading similar kinds of blogs and enjoy similar kinds of infographics. You can target more people with less effort here and fewer time spent on designing new infographics. Design in such a way that the reader feels educated after seeing it and feels he or she has learnt something. This is different for people from different walks of life. Adapt to the needs of your readers and your infographics will perform much better.
Conciseness: Avoid using too much text and keep it simple. Your graphics should do the talking. If you clutter your infographics with lots of text, readers will lose attention soon. They might also feel overwhelmed. Apart from this, a design with too much text just does not look as good as designs which are left ‘free to breathe’. Using charts, diagrams, nicely edited images and graphs to impart the information is more preferable. Another downside of using lots of text is that it constrains the freedom that you have with your visual cues. You get less space to show off your visual depictions. Using text might give some the impression that more information is conveyed this way. However, this is not the case. Visual cues are always more effective in promoting your ideas and views.
Cover Small Topics: As discussed in the previous point, too much information or the ‘impression of it’ overwhelms the reader. Stick to a single topic which is small and easy to digest. You have lots of time to write and design more about other topics. Going out with a single topic allows you to cover the crucial points completely. It also helps you avoid cluttered designs. Infographics are meant to be easy to comprehend. Do not make them complicated and full of diverse topics. Conciseness is one of the most important points when it comes to designing good infographics.
Work On Your Storytelling: Infographics should follow a process flow much like a story or a comic book. When you read a comic book, you know the order in which characters exchange their words. This is made possible via visual aids used by the artist. Similarly, infographics should have an order. Information should be given in a way that the reader knows where to start from just by looking at it. You can do this by using different font sizes and placing texts and media in a certain order. Use headings of different sizes to attract the eye of the reader to that portion of the design. Use smaller headings for sub-topics. Designs that read like a story are more easy to understand and give a more pleasant experience to your audience.
Use Consistent Fonts: Use an easy-to-read font that is consistent in the entire design. Different fonts in a single design is a big no-no. If you must, you can use a different font for your heading but that’s it. A consistent font is more sophisticated and makes the reader feel comfortable with the infographic. Use large and bold fonts that can put out the information at first glance. If you are going to publish the infographic within your blog post then it is advisable to use fonts according to your websites UI. It will ultimately improve the ux.
Give References: Since infographics are like small capsules of relevant data, always cite your sources from where you pick them. Place the references in a small font at the bottom of the design so that readers can use them as a link if they want to research more on the subject. Using references also increases credibility and lands a more lasting and impacting impression on the reader. If you can, link these references to the webpage that you picked them up from. If the webpage resides on your domain, then it can also act as a great means to interlink your pages and buff up your search engine ranking.
Include URLs And Social Media Hooks: Include links to your social media handles via your infographics. If the reader is interested in your design, he or she can check out more works by you and read more of your content. You can use this to gain more audience and get people to spend more time on your blog. If you have a website or an online store, links to them can help you get leads and potential buyers as well. It is all about promoting your brand and your ideas to the masses. Always use hashtags when you publish your infographic on your social media profiles. Try to make creative hashtags which can go viral with your infographics. Use a hashtag generator to help you find hashtags for your posts. Search for hashtags by random, top hashtags, or best match
In A Nutshell
Use of infographics by large brands has increased multiple folds over the past few years. They have become an important part of any blog or informative article. Using them helps you get more traffic and retains more people on your blog. They are great means of educating your audience about yourself, your brand, or your product/service.
Check out this article from Pixelfondue for more tips on illustration.
