Principles of Good Infographic Design:
Today's post is designed to develop a single, sound principle to aid in the creation of an infographic. First, some assumptions about the information. The information you are presenting must meet the following criteria:
- It connects to the viewer's previous experience in some real way.
- It adds a new perspective to prior knowledge
- It is not passe or boring
If these assumptions are not met, even a very well designed infographic will fall short.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, onto a single sound principle. After looking at a number of infographics, I started to notice a good number that seemed more like posters. For example:
While this particular infographic is poor in many ways, the first and most noticeable is that nearly all the text is in one large clump. Unless the reader is really grabbed by the first sentence, it is not likely that they will finish reading it! Instead, chunk your information into small parts, and do not use dense text. Examples:
Regardless of the information being presented, long, paragraph form text is simply off limits. The infographic format is designed to overcome the limits of text only formats. Don't make the mistake of simply bringing text's limitations to a format designed to over come those very limitations!
Hi, Peter:
ReplyDeleteYour Hoosier Buddy comes late but still in time. I like your idea of "not being passe or boring" to be a principle of an infographic. I think infographics are made to rescue the readers from terrible digits and cold facts, so they do mean to bring visual-satisfaction.But I am afraid, there might be an unexpected trend of infographics as they might go to the extremes, too complicated，too entwined and sometimes a little bit gaudy.I think you have the similar opinion as you said"don't use condensed text". I can not read messy text, especially when it is not in my first language...
Next, I think it is hard to find "new" perspectives but "different" perspectives for readers. Readers are in diversity, so you can not find something which is new to all of them. For example,"H1N1" was just a name of avian flu for medical specialists, but it became popluar among the public after the epidemic spread out globally. Infographic can not be a prophet to add on new things but provide more angles, different perspectives. In my own infographic designing, I would try to reorganize the "old" information and represent it in a different way.
I do love magazines which can provide us great infographics.(Newspaper usually can not do as good jobs due to the cheaper texture of the paper and printing )That is the reason I love economist so much!I started to subscribe the printed edition from this month.