How to create attractive infographics (Complete Guide)

I hope you’re ready to learn how to make great infographics.

Infographic designing is easy when you have a proper structure and plan. In other words, you should know what you want to make and how to make it.

I’m going to teach you how you can create attractive infographics in just six simple steps.

As you go further in this course, I’ll take more about the nuts and bolts of infographic designing.

Steps to create an infographic

Let’s take a look at the steps to create an infographic:

Step 1 – Create an outline for your content

Before you begin the designing work, create an outline for your infographic. Your outline should be precise. An outline will help you decide how many sections are required and the content of each section.

Step 2 – Collect data for your infographic

Once you have an outline ready, start collecting data for your infographic. Read articles, research papers, and reports to find interesting data and statistics for your infographic.

During this step, collect all kinds of data relevant to your infographic. Once you have enough data, you can choose what data to put in your infographic.

Step 3 – Create a rough layout

Now that you have a solid outline and data, you can create a rough layout of your infographic. A layout will help you decide where to put what in your infographic.

Look at other infographics for inspiration to find the perfect layout for your infographic.

Step 4 – Start designing

Now the fun begins:

Start with designing your infographic. You can use different tools available to create your infographic.

During designing, you should follow a proper style guide to maintain consistency.

Step 5 – Add final touches and prepare to publish

After completing the design of your infographic, improve your infographic by fixing small mistakes and adding final touches here and there to your design.

Once this is done, you can prepare to publish your infographic.

Step 6 – Publish and promote

Press that publish button on your website and start promoting your infographic. This is the most difficult part as getting traffic and shares is not easy.

So, these are the six steps to create an infographic. I have dedicated separate lessons to these steps to help you get a detailed view to understand how to create an attractive infographic.

5 Essential Elements of a GREAT infographic

Have you ever wondered what makes an infographic go viral? Why do some infographics get tons of links and some don’t?

Anyone with even basic designing skills can make an infographic. But, what makes an infographic good or bad?

It all lies in using these essential elements in your infographic.

Element 1 – A story

Throwing out random facts and numbers won’t make a good infographic no matter how awesome its design is.

Your infographic needs a story. To craft a good story, you need to take a look at what your audience’s interests are and how your infographic can resonate with them.

Element 2 – Data and statistics

No matter what kind of infographic you are creating, it should have data. It adds more credibility to your infographic.

But you MUST ensure that you use credible sources for your data and also cite these sources.

Element 3 – A visual style and flow

Your infographic should have a visual style that is easily recognizable by the reader. This can be done by using a color palette and having a consistent design throughout the infographic.

Flow is also an essential element as it helps the reader follow through the content.

Element 4 – Simplicity

A good infographic doesn’t mean having complex illustrations, graphics, text all over. The more simple your infographic, the more appealing it is.

Limit the number of fonts, illustrations, shapes, and other design elements. Only keep elements that are essential to your content.

Always remember that the goal of a good design is to force the reader to focus on what is important. Use a lot of empty space to avoid cluttering your infographic.

Element 5 – Originality

Your infographic needs to be original. Otherwise, it’s just another infographic in a pile of hundreds of similar infographics.

You can achieve originality by using the latest statistics and information. Design-wise, you can make your infographic original by using a different style.

Research different infographics of your topic and come up with ideas to make your infographic stand out from the rest.

These are the five elements that make an infographic great. Keep in mind that without any one of these elements, your infographic wouldn’t be able to create the impact you want.

Collecting Data For Your Infographics

Picture this situation:

You want to create an infographic but you don’t know how to get data for it.

What will you do in such a situation? Will you create an infographic without any stats or data? Or will go on a hunt to find data?

And if you go on a hunt, how will you collect data?

Collecting data is very important as it adds credibility to your content.

And here are some ways to collect data:

Method 1 – Look at your competitors and their infographic

The quickest way to collect data is to spy on your competition and see if they have mentioned any data in their content.

You can also look for infographics that have the same topic as yours and see if they had mentioned any data or statistics.

Then, you can look at sources of these citations and get more data for your infographic.

Method 2 – Survey or poll your own audience

If you have a sizeable amount of audience, you can survey them to get data for your infographic.

Conducting polls on social media and on your website is very easy with the help of tools and can help gather data for your infographic.

Method 3 – Google it

The most basic answer to how to find data is “You just Google it”. And it’s actually not a bad method.

You can find data and stats by using operators such as:

“Your topic” + data
“Your topic” + stats
“Your topic” + statistics
…and so on.

You can even do an image search to find graphs and charts about your topic.

Once you collect data, it’s time for you visualizing it in your infographic.

Visualizing Data In Your Infographics

You can visualize data in many different ways. Regardless of how you visualize data, you need to organize it first.

Here’s how to organize your data for an infographic:

Step 1 – Collect the data for your infographic
Step 2 – Learn and analyze your data
Step 3 – Think a way to display the data

Displaying data in your infographic could be done in many different ways. Here is how you can do it:

Method 1 – Use graphs

Using pie charts and bar graphs can make your data more appealing and engaging to your reader.

Don’t believe it? See it yourself:

You can create graphs using tools like Google Sheets.

If you’re using an online infographic design tool, they do provide the feature of creating attractive graphs.

Method 2 – Use a flowchart

Flowcharts are another way to display data in your infographic. If you’re solving a data-driven problem in your infographic, using flowcharts is the best way to do it.

Method 3 – Use illustrations along with huge numbers

You can illustrations to put emphasis on your data. You can display the numbers of your data in a big size to increase the level of engagement in your infographic.

So, that’s how you can visualize data in your infographics. Once you start designing infographics, you’ll come across different methods to display the data in your infographics.

Typography plays an important role in this and you should have a good understanding of using typography in your infographics.

7 Types Of Infographics & When To Create Them

Ever wondered how many types of infographics are there?

When you talk design and purpose wise, you can create different types of infographics. In this lesson, I’ll talk about the 7 different types of infographics and when you should create them.

So, here we go:

Type 1 – List Based Infographics

These are infographics that list a collection of tips, resources, examples, and whatnot. List infographics are very popular and don’t take up much time and resources to create.

When To Create: Create list infographics when you want to replace a basic list in your content with something more visual and appealing.

Type 2 – Comparison Infographics

A comparison infographic compares two or more things head-to-head. These are great to visualize the differences between the things being compared.

When To Create: If your content has any sort of comparison, you can create a comparison infographic to garner more attention of the reader.

Type 3 – Statistical Infographics

Statistical infographics display data and numbers in a visual manner. Charts, icons, and graphs are often used to visualize the data.

When To Create: You can turn boring survey data or stats into appealing and engaging infographics using statistical infographics.

Type 4 – Informational Infographics

You can also call them general infographics as they contain information that helps the user. The information can be a combination of stats, list, process, or something else.

When To Create: You can create an informational infographic when you have content around a topic and want to share it with your audience in a visual manner.

Type 5 – Process Infographics

Process infographics share steps of a process. A process infographic can also be in the form of a flowchart.

When To Create: You can visualize step-by-step processes in your content using process infographics to help the reader understand more easily.

Type 6 – Timeline Infographics

A timeline infographic shares events or process in chronological order.

When To Create: You can also use timeline infographics to take your reader on a journey.

There are many other types of infographics but these are the most common as they are easy to consume and therefore get shared easily.

Whenever you want to create an infographic, it’s a good idea to look at these types of infographics and pick one.

Best Dimensions For An Infographic

So you want to design an infographic. You open your preferred design tool and create a new file. You’re asked to choose the dimensions of your infographic.

And, now you’re stuck. Stuck because you don’t know the correct dimensions of your infographic.

This is the most basic and frustrating problem inexperienced infographic designers face. I used to suffer from this a lot too.

But after having designed a bunch of infographics now, I know EXACTLY what to do. And that’s what I’m going to teach you in today’s lesson.

The first question you might have is “What’s the standard size of an infographic?”.

And the answer is that there is no standard size. But, designers often follow some ground rules for infographic dimensions so that it can be easily viewed on different websites on multiple devices.

That being said, your infographic should have a width of 800-1200px. If your width is in this range, it can be easily added to websites and social media.

However, the height of the infographic really doesn’t matter. It mostly depends on the content of your infographic. Infographics can have a height of 5000px or even more.

I know these numbers might be confusing you. So, here’s something that will help you.

Follow a 1:4 width to height ratio for your vertical infographics. This will help you choose the right dimensions for your infographic.

Let me sum up everything I just said for you:

• Follow a 1:4 width to height ratio for your infographic.
• The width of your infographic matters a lot. Keep your width between 800-1200px.
• The height of your infographic depends on the content. Determine the height of your infographic by following the 1:4 ratio.
• It’s better to make your infographics to be too big instead of being too small.

I hope now you know how to set the RIGHT dimensions for your infographic.

Best Tools for Infographic Design

It doesn’t matter which tool you use to design an infographic.

I’ve seen infographics made from professional graphic designing tools such as Adobe Illustrator that look just like the ones created using an online infographic designing tool.

Still, if you’re not a designer or have no prior designing experience, choosing the right tool is important for you.

So, here are the 5 best tools that you can use for infographic design and which one is right for you:

Tool 1 – Adobe Illustrator

I design almost all my infographics using Adobe Illustrator. It’s the best tool for designing infographics.

For someone who is a designer, Adobe Illustrator is very easy to use. But, if you’re not a designer, you’ll have a hard time designing an infographic right off the bat. Therefore, I wouldn’t recommend you to use Adobe Illustrator if you’re not a designer.

Tool 2 – Affinity Designer

This tool is a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. It has features of both tools but again, you would first have to get used to working with Affinity to design an infographic.

Tool 3 – Visme

Visme, in my opinion, is the perfect infographic design tool for beginners. The tool contains a huge library of assets such as charts, graphs, diagrams, and graphics.

I even asked some of my non-designer friends to use the tool and they found it very simple and easy to use.

There are many other infographic design tools out there that I’ve used. But the tools I mentioned in this list are some of the best. Depending on your designing skills, you can choose the tool of your choice.

But, even if you’re a designer but have never designed an infographic, I would recommend you to design your first infographic using Visme.

Using colors in your infographics

Have you ever read an article about color psychology? It’s eye-opening to know that a large spectrum (pun intended) of people still discuss and research color theory.

And, as someone who wants to design attractive infographics, it’s important to have a clear sense and knowledge of how to use colors.

In this lesson, I’ll teach you in a very simple way, how to use colors in your infographics. Let’s get started.

Here are some general rules that MUST follow to ensure that you don’t under or overuse colors in your infographics:

• Pick ONLY 1 or 2 colors as your primary or main colors for your infographics. These colors should be clear and bold.
• The other colors you use should be complementary colors. Overall, your infographic should not have more than 4 colors.
• If you wish to use more than 4 colors, then only use shades of the 4 colors you choose.
• Use a lot of white (empty) space to avoid the stressing the reader’s eyes.

So, these are just some ground rules you should follow. Now, let’s take a look at how to use colors in your infographics.

Use brand colors

Though not always necessary, it is often the safest way to choose the right colors for your infographic.

For example, if you’re creating an infographic about Facebook, the best color choice would be blue, as it’s Facebook’s brand color.

Create a color palette

Create a color palette to ensure that you stay within the theme you chose for your design. A color palette is nothing but a collection of colors you are using in a design project.

Choose colors based on context

An easy way to choose the right color is by taking a look at the topic of your infographic. The context of your infographic will help you decide the perfect color.

For example – An infographic about nature would look great if green color is used and wouldn’t be very attractive if a color like purple or red is used.

These 3 tips are more than enough to help you decide the right color of your infographic.

Still, if you ever face difficulty in choosing a color, just take a look at competitor infographics to get an idea of how they used colors in their infographics.

How to use fonts in your infographic

Fonts are the most important element in an infographic. It’s because that’s what enables the reader to read the content.

That’s why choosing the right font is crucial for infographic success.

Here’s how typography should work in an infographic:

Find out the content and context

The first step is to determine the type of content and the context. This can help you find out the emotions your infographic would evoke and help you choose the type of fonts that can be used. Your fonts should match the theme of your infographic.

Choose a readable body font

The headings font of your infographic can be fancy as it needs to get the reader’s attention. But your body font should be simple and readable.

Don’t try to use fancy fonts for your body content as you’ll end up with an infographic that’s not even readable.

Pick a font palette

Just like a color palette, your infographic should have a font palette. You should create a font palette and stick to it throughout your infographic to maintain consistency and flow.

Having different fonts for each heading or content will throw the reader off and will drain their interest in the infographic.

Align everything

Proper alignment will help establish a clear structure and make your infographic more appealing.

Your headings and body content should be properly aligned with each other. Also, maintain proper and consistent spacing in between your content to have some structure.

These 4 steps will help you improve the typography of your infographic. But we’re not done here.

The best fonts for infographic design

Now, let’s talk about the best fonts you can use in your infographic. But before we begin, here are some resources where you can find the best fonts for your infographics.

Google Fonts

Google Fonts is one of the best places to find great free fonts for your infographic. They have a collection of fonts that are widely used in web design and thus are considered very readable.

Fontspring

You can find some really gorgeous free and paid fonts on Fontspring. This is my go-to place to find fonts for my design projects.

Now that we’ve discussed the resources to find fonts, let me share the best fonts that you can use for infographic design.

1. Futura PT – Fontspring
2. Roboto – Google Fonts
3. Lato – Google Fonts
4. Montserrat – Google Fonts
5. Helvetica Neue – My Fonts
6. Poppins – Google Fonts
7. Acumin Pro – Fontspring
8. Merriweather – Google Fonts
9. Oswald – Google Fonts
10. Raleway  – Google Fonts

These are the best of the best and no matter what type of infographic you’re designing, these fonts match perfectly.

It’s always necessary to have fonts like these in your arsenal because they are fonts that can be used anywhere.

The best resources for infographics

Resources for finding illustrations are:

Shutterstock

Shutterstock has a huge collection of beautiful illustrations and icons that you can use in your infographic.

Freepik

If Shutterstock foes out of your budget, Freepik is a free alternative that has some great illustrations that can be used in your infographic designs.

Flaticon

Flaticon is famous for its premium icons. You can find both free and paid icons for your icons on Flaticon.

Resources for finding data

UN Data

A database of all United Nations data.

Datasets Subreddit

A subreddit where you can find tons of datasets that can be used in your infographics.

Data Portals

A huge portal of datasets all around the world.

Other Resources

Buffer

A social media scheduling tool to help you schedule posts to promote your infographic.

Adobe Color Wheel

Create color palettes for your infographic using the color wheel tool.

Blob Maker

A usual tool that you can use to generate blob shapes. You can control the look and color of your shape and save it. Then, you can use these shapes to make your infographics more attractive.

Questions to ask before publishing an infographic

Before getting too hyped up about your infographic and hitting that publish button, you need to hold back and take things further slowly.

Why?

Because I’ve been caught up being excited about my work and made huge blunders. That’s why it’s always important that you take a step back and ask yourself these questions before publishing your infographic:

Does my infographic have a purpose?

It’s obvious that you have a purpose behind the infographic. Your purpose might be to educate your audience, solve a problem, or provoke curiosity among readers.

Whatever your purpose is, it should be clear that you know the purpose before publishing the infographic.

Does my infographic provide value?

A simple ‘Yes’ won’t work here. Show your infographic to your friends or people in your network and get an opinion from them.

This is something I always do before publishing my infographics. And, you know what?

Every time I showed my infographic, I got a piece of advice that will help me improve my infographic.

You might think your infographic is great and provides value but you should ALWAYS look at your infographic from the reader’s eyes. That way you’ll know how valuable your infographic really is.

Is my infographic readable?

Do a final check to see how readable your infographic is. Again, showing your infographic to a bunch of people will help you get some helpful feedback.

You have to ensure that your choice of fonts, font sizes, colors, and layout is good and doesn’t cause difficulties in consuming the content of the infographic.

Does my infographic have a flow?

From the beginning to the end, your infographic should have a flow. The reader should be able to follow the flow of your infographic.

Are there any spelling or grammar errors?

Designers often overlook this and I’m guilty of doing this too. Read your infographic WORD BY WORD and check for spelling and grammar errors.

There is a pretty simple fix for this.

Use Grammarly to ensure everything you type is easy to read, effective, and most importantly free of any grammar or spelling errors.

Because once you publish your infographic and it’s distributed everywhere, you won’t be able to fix those embarrassing spelling mistakes.

In conclusion, always ask these five questions before publishing your infographic. This will ensure that your infographic doesn’t have any problems that you will have to deal later.

How to publish an Infographic the RIGHT way

Once you’re confident about your infographic, you can finally hit the publish the button.

But is that it?

Do you just publish it like that? Without doing anything else? Do you feel something missing?

Yes, there is! Just like we discussed things to get right about your infographic, in this lesson, we’ll learn how to publish your infographic to your blog.

I’ll teach you what your infographic page should look like. You can’t just publish an infographic and expect to get hundreds of shares.

Here’s what your infographic page should have:

Social sharing buttons

The first and the most important element of your page are social sharing buttons. Without them, your infographic is useless.

Make sure your infographic page has social sharing buttons of all major social platforms.

A Brief introduction

If you’re publishing a stand-alone infographic, you should have a brief introduction to it. Your introduction should be the pre-hook to get your audience excited to read your infographic.

The introduction can be around 200-300 words and should clearly explain what your infographic is about and how it will help your audience.

Embed code

Having an embed code increases the chances of getting links to your infographic. An embed code helps anyone easily add your infographic to their website.

You can use this tool for generating an embed code for your infographic.

The infographic (of course!)

Don’t forget to add your infographic. Just kidding! I’m sure you will. 😉

Additional infographic content

You can also add content explaining your infographic. This is not always necessary but it surely helps to create a fully fledged piece of content that can get more shares and links.

Once you have all these elements on your infographic page, you’re ready to go!

Just remember this:

Treat your infographic page as a landing page. This way you will always ensure that your page is optimized to generate shares and drive engagement.

How to market your infographic?

You’ve finally published your infographic!

It’s time to market it.

Here’s how you can market your infographic to get maximum exposure and traffic:

Step 1 – Do the bare minimum

First, do the most basic and essential task of sharing your infographic. And, these tasks are:

• Share it on all your social platforms
• Share it to your email list
• Pin it to your Pinterest board

Step 2 – Submit to infographic directories

There are many infographic submission directories where you can submit your infographic. These directories will help you get exposure to your infographic and will also help you get a backlink.

I’ve shared some of the best infographic submission sites here.

Step 3 – Blogger outreach

The next step is to reach out to bloggers who have written content on topics similar to your infographic. You can reach out to them and ask them to include your infographic in their content.

Step 4 – Guestographics method

Reach out to bloggers and request them to publish your infographic in their blog. But, instead of just asking them to publish your infographic, provide them with 200-300 words of content that they can use with the infographic.

This way you’re guest posting your infographic on other blogs and gaining both exposure and links.

Step 5 – Target influencers

Reach out to influencers who would be interested in reading your infographic. If they like it, you can ask them to share it on their social media. This can help you get tons of views depending on the influencer’s reach.

These are just some ways to market your infographic. Marketing an infographic is not easy but it’s not difficult either. Just follow the same promotion tactics and methods you use to promote your blog post and promote your infographic.

There are no rules as to how you design the layout, choose colors or any other elements of your infographic.

But, there are some boundaries that you should know of before you design an infographic.

So, here are some Do’s and Don’ts that you should keep in mind while designing an infographic:

Do’s

1. Keep your infographic simple and try to break down your message in one simple sentence.
2. Always add links to your sources and citations in your infographic. You might have seen many infographics mention the sources and citations at the end of the infographic. This adds credibility to your infographic.
3. Create a narrative and tell a story. An infographic with just interesting facts and charts is useless unless it has a narrative.
4. Use color theory to understand what colors to use where. Keep in mind that each color has its emotional impact to the user.
5. Use attractive titles and headlines to evoke the interest of the user.

Don’ts

1. Don’t rely on visuals to convey an idea. Use sentences to help the user understand the message you’re trying to convey.
2. Avoid using complex charts with unorganized data. Just because it looks good doesn’t mean you should add it to your infographic.
3. Don’t show data without any context. Your data won’t evoke any emotion if there is no context behind it.
4. Don’t use too many colors all at once. You don’t want to hurt your reader’s eyes.
5. Don’t try to fit too much data in your charts.

Keep in mind these Dos and Don’ts while designing an infographic. Infographic design is not just about what you design, it’s more about how you design it.

Stock photos in infographics: Yay or Nay?

Ever since I started infographic designing, I came across thousands of both good and bad infographics.

In a way, you can say that I’ve seen the best of the best and the worst of the worst.

And, one great way to screw up an infographic is using stock photos in it.

But Ahfaz, I thought there’s nothing in using infographics. What are you trying to pull here?

Let me explain:

A simple definition of an infographic is that it’s a graphic visualization of facts and figures. Infographics contain graphical elements such as charts and illustrations.

Using a stock photo in an infographic will sabotage not only the design of your infographic but also the emotion it intended to create.

So, what to do instead?

Instead of using stock photos in your infographics, I would recommend you replace them with illustrations.

Don’t know how to create illustrations?

Well, there are plenty of resources online where you can find great illustrations. My favorite resource that I recommend to designers is Shutterstock. You can find some of the best illustrations for your infographic.