Deliverable 1:

How to design your Infographic part 1

© Karen Thompson ● Department of English ● University of Idaho1

Infographics are different from posters.

• Posters are designed to be printed and displayed on walls.

• The goal is to design them to catch the eye of a person passing by them.

• This is not the purpose of an infographic.

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Scientific posters.• Scientific posters are

designed to be printed and displayed:• next to a researcher at a

conference or expo,• in a hallway next to a

laboratory.• Like other posters, they are

designed to attract a viewer as the person walks by them.

• This is not the purpose of an infographic.

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The audience for scientific posters have a high-level of technical expertise.

Infographics are designed for the web.

• And because they are designed to be displayed on a web page, most are longer than they are wide because users prefer to scroll down rather than across.

• They supplement other information and are rarely presented as “stand-alone” communication.

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Infographics can also be horizontal.• But, there are horizontally

designed infographics such as the Bilion Dollar O-Gram designed by David McCandless.

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And this infographic that depicts the relief well and sub-sea well containment progress during the 2010 BP oil spill.

There are no standard dimensions.

The designers at Visual.ly offer this advice:

• There’s no perfect size, but if you’re looking for a starting point try:no wider than 600 px no longer than 2000 px

That’s 8” wide and 26” tall.

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• A common ratio of width to length is: 1:4

• How you size the infographic is up to you but just keep in mind that you are designing it to be displayed on a web page.

Types of Infographics.•Data Infographics: emphasize numerical data in non-standard ways to tell a data story.

•Explanatory Infographics: explain concepts that are difficult to understand through a mix of visuals and text.

•You will be creating a data infographic not an explanatory infographic.

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Definition of a Data Infographic• a data infographic makes

complex statistical informationeasier for audiences to understand by revealing patterns, trends, and correlations that might go undetected or would be difficult to understand unless presented in a visual context.

• The emphasis is on the data being visualized and text is kept to a minimum.

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Some examples of data infographics.

How to Present

the Data Story10

Some data stories are about helping a viewer comprehend the scale of something.

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The data story is conveyed by converting the statistical data into ratios in relationship to one another and using shapes that are sized to correspond with those ratios.

Scale of Devastation

Billion Dollar O-Gram

Global Carbon Footprint

Some data stories combine a scale of something with other parts of the data story.

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This infographic uses scaled shapes to convey installed capacity of renewable energy with a pictograph (the human shapes) and a more standard bar chart.

NOTE: keep text to a minimum in your infographic.

Use Grids to Design the Layout• The key to using grids is to

understand how to apply two central principles of effective graphic design:

1. Focal points2. Visual Hierarchy

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Focal points carry visual weight that draws your eye to notice them. Here the circles and the squares are focal points, but the circl is the dominent element or focal point.

Focal points have levels:

Dominant (the level with the most visual weight).

Sub-dominant (the level that gets secondary attention)

Subordinate (the level with the least visual weigh.

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DominantFocal Point (spigot and water)

Sub-dominant focal points are the circles.

A focal point helps to convey the point of your visual.

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Focal point is the shape of the foot made by the combination of these circles.

Visual Hierarchy • A hierarchy is an organization of items into different levels of importance

• Visual hierarchy is conveyed by emphasizing one element over another (focal points) and communicates meaning through repetition and alignment.

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Rule of Thirds.• The rule of thirds is a three-

frame wide by three-frame deep grid that can rest over an image and tell designers a lot about how eyes will follow the image or design.

The grid helps designers understand how and where a person will look at an image.

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Using the Rule of Three

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The grids do not need to be equally spaced, but using alignment here and white space (not filling all the grids), created a compelling advertisement for Apple’s product.

Another example of using rule of threes.

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Ways to Create the Infographic• Use Word, PPT, Microsoft Publisher. You will need to adjust the

page size – do not create your infographic as a PPT slideshow.

• Use a Free Infographic Creator Tool. • See a list of these under tools and resources on the project

page. Some tools will host your file. In that case, submit the URL link but be sure it works. For others, you download the file as an image or PDF, and in that case upload your file to the bblearn drop box.

• Free tools always have some limitations, so work with them with this in mind. Also, some have a higher learning curve than others. If you try to use a tool, and it is hard to do, choose another option.

• If you are familiar with using more sophisticated graphic design tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, Gimp, etc., feel free to use whatever works best for you. Don’t try to learn one of these, however, if you have never used it before. 21

Using Grids: in PPT and Word, you can turn on a feature that displays grids.

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Grids help you keep the elements in the infographic aligned effectively.

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Page Size: you can use the custom page size feature to set the width and length of a Word document page.

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Page Size: use the custom page size feature to set the width and length of a PowerPoint slide. NOTE: use only ONE slide.

Apply principles of

Gestalt Design25

See How to Design an Infographic part 2.