In today’s content marketing landscape, infographics are all the rage. And considering that it’s 60,000 times faster for your brain to understand visuals over text, it’s easy to see why this piece of content is an important part of any account based marketing strategy.
If you want to get started on creating effective and engaging infographics, but aren’t sure where to begin, we’ve compiled the seven best tips to help you sharpen your design skills and crush it!
(Before we dive into the best practices for creating a memorable infographic, though, you may want to refresh yourself by reading our primer on tips and tricks for designers.)
1. Know Your Audience
It sounds like simple advice–but before you dive into the creating the outline or story of your infographic, you first want to know who you’re creating it for. Although it’s tempting to copy styles that have been popular before, you risk alienating your target audience that way.
If you’re targeting teachers, for example, you may consider designing the infographic in the style of a chalkboard to generate immediate attention and interest rather than relying on a generic background in hopes of getting the biggest audience. Or if your audience loves numbers, you may use more statistics with quick bullet points.
2. Keep it Simple
It’s tempting to design infographics that use lots of charts and headers in an effort to look “cool.” The heart of the infographic, though, is to easily communicate a lot of information–so the design should focus mostly on earning an “oh, I get it” moment rather than a “wait, what did I just read?” moment.
A good rule of thumb is to focus on five to six really powerful points. If you find your infographic is becoming complex with too much information, you may consider breaking into a series.
3. Stay Focused
Simplicity in message and design is all about focus–knowing what you want your message to be as well as how to best communicate it. In that regard, you don’t want to sprinkle a bunch of random facts and figures throughout the infographic; they should all work together to tell one cohesive story focused on a single point, not a novel of information. Every design or text inclusion should be done purposefully, not just because you think it’d look cool.
4. Show, Don’t Tell
If the information you’re trying to communicate is complex, you might want want to use a lot of words in the name of clarity. While some words are necessary, it’s important to show, not tell, your message. After all, it’s an infographic, so you want to focus on the graphic, not so much on the (text) info.
5. Tell a Story
As we mentioned before, a picture tells a 60,000 word story; so, the greatest strength of an infographic is that it can flow, tell a story, both cognitively and visually. In fact, a well made infographic will be able to convey an idea by sequentially and seamlessly taking you from idea to the next, much like an author guides you through the timeline of a novel. A designer should be able to connect the dots for you, showing you their thought process through a clear flow and hierarchy.
6. Make it Digestible
This rule goes hand in hand with simplicity and focus–even if your message is complex, you don’t want the infographic to be huge or extremely long. Best practices call for a length of no more than 5,000-8,000 pixels and a width of 735 pixels. Any more and your reader will likely nod off.
Also important to keep in mind is file size. For quick loading, we recommend limiting your infographic to 1.5 MB.
7. Inspire to Action
One important, but often missing, element of an infographic is a call to action. (After all, infographics are part of a larger account based marketing strategy that guides readers on a journey through a sales funnel.) In this case, you want to be able to tell your readers what you want them to do with the information you gave them. Should they contact you for more? Sign up for your newsletter?
For more information on creating an effective and memorable infographic, reach out to us today! (See what we did there?)
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