So this is the third part of a beginner's guide to creating shareable infographics and if you watch the last two episodes in part one I was talking about what makes a good infographic and in the second episode I talked about the types of infographics. And today in part three I want to talk to you about the steps to follow before you create your actual infographic. Now this video is probably going to be about 12 to 15 minutes long and I'm going to go through it and cover as much as I can and bear with me. So number one this is very similar to another topic that I did where it was about how to create compelling presentations and in that one I talked in detail about how you need to define your target audience because your target audience is what is important in regards to the tone and the way that you're going to be presenting. So, for example, you need to establish who you're communicating to.
Is this going to be a sales type infographic? Is it going to be for the marketing community? Is it going to be for a corporate community and utilized internally? Or is it going to be, for example, for academics in terms of teachers and students who are presented at a university? So depending on that, you need to establish the tone of your infographic.
And number two, you have to define your goals. After you establish your audience, you've got to define your goals. What is the infographic going to be about? You need to ask yourself a question.
What exactly do I want to achieve with this infographic? Because depending on what that answer is, it's going to tailor towards the type of infographic, the formatting, and everything else that's going to follow. You want to reveal hidden trends and patterns using data. Or are you going to be breaking down complex data into snackable, easy to digestible format?
Are you going to be providing your audience with a step-by-step guideline as far as how to do things? For example, how to create an infographic. That will be a how to guide. Or are you going to be raising awareness for a specific issue or a cause?
Or perhaps you want to create a comprehensive go-to-visual resource on a specific topic. Or maybe you want to compare two or more products or concepts. Perhaps you want to compare the iPhone to a Samsung phone. That will be a comparison type of infographic that I talked about in the last episode about the types of different infographics. Maybe you want to translate a story such as a brand story into a timeline infographic.
In that case, you'll be utilizing a timeline format. So once you establish that, you want to move on to defining the medium. What is the medium you're going to be presenting on? So this is actually pretty important because depending on the medium is going to tailor towards the size and even the height of your infographic. So you want to establish that.
To get into a little more detail, if you look here, the longer format, now if you're, let's say, presenting and embedding this into a website, you're going to be dealing with an infographic that could pretty much scroll as tall as you want it to be. So perhaps it's 800 pixels wide, but it could be 1600 pixels tall. But when you're dealing with a printable version, if you want to actually download it and print it, then perhaps you're dealing with an 8.5 by 11 sheet. And it may be multiple pages, but you need to make sure your infographic cuts off at a certain point so it doesn't bleed over to the next page.
So you want to establish the actual medium itself. Additionally, the image resolution, when you're dealing with web-based infographics, the resolution does not have to be as high of a resolution as perhaps if you're going to do it for print. So that's something else to consider. But typically these days, most infographics are online, they're embedded, they're shared online, and so you really don't have to worry so much about the image resolution and so on.
Now, number four, you want to choose your topic. And when it comes to choosing your topic, it's a lot of a process, very similar process to writing an effective piece of communication, a report or a book and so on. The procedure is not that much different.
First you got to organize your ideas. You want to establish a thesis statement and then you want to support your thesis with arguments. Now, in terms of the thesis statement, this is kind of your main idea and your opinion around it. and you want to back it up with data.
So you have a certain opinion but it's very important in terms of infographics. You're dealing with data and figures and stats. You want to utilize those, conduct research, and back it up with actual data.
Those are key elements for your infographic. Finding the right information is the next step, number five. Typically, sometimes you may be repurposing infographic based on an article. If you're not doing that, that means you don't really have the information. So you need to actually mine the data.
Google is going to be your best friend. It's a great starting point. You can pretty much find anything online, but it's important that the information you have is subjective.
If you don't find the right information or it's not concrete enough, then you probably want to tap into recent published surveys or polls or you can conduct your own. You can tap into recent press releases and you can even go as far as doing your interviews with certain subject matter that would be the professionals or would have the information. will be the experts in that field.
Now, next is the process of your data. So here's the thing. You collect a lot of information and data in Infographics. You do your research and so data is going to be kind of in a raw format.
You need to be able to take that information and you need to be able to actually tailor it into an easy to use format. So you may have it in an Excel format or maybe in a table. You need to get it down into Excel and then download or export it as a CSV file.
CSV is basically... Another format where you can just file, save as in Excel and then you can take that data and you can pretty much import it to many other programs. So for example, our own product VisMe allows you to take CSV and import it or copy paste cells right into it and then pull up your chart or even connect it to live data.
So that information that you have, you need to clean it up and have it into an easy to use format that you can do things with it. Now let's go to number seven. This is where you got to find your story in the data.
Now You want to, you know, to put it into perspective, you want to actually interview your data. Treat your data as if it's a person or an individual. Because by doing that, you'll be able to find a story worth telling. So you want to ask questions of your data.
You want to first clean it up and actually format it so it's easy to understand. And then you want to make sense of it. So you can do that by actually looking for patterns and trends.
And those patterns and trends are going to allow you to actually form your story. And then from there on, create your infographic. So let's go through some examples.
You may be looking for changes over time. So the data may show you trends and changes over a period of time. It might be where there is a difference and similarities between items where you can compare things together as a result. It might be where there's a composition of a whole so the makeup or composition of something.
And perhaps it's last but not least it could be the relationship between two or more variables. So let's go on into analyzing the trends. You want to use visuals to find trends. And in that area you can tap into bar charts and line charts. They are actually great for showing you how to analyze trends.
Let's look at an example here. So what we have here is a line graph. And in this line graph we're looking at the America's divorce rate over the last 30 years.
Notice that it is not 2 years or 3 years, it is actually multiple years. Because based on that line graph you can actually create an actual trend over a period of time. So you can see the trend has...
decreased over the last 30 years. Or you want to actually compare values. So when you compare values you can use bar charts and you can use line charts.
So in this example here, one important thing is you want to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, not apples to oranges. What do I mean by that? So if you look here, it's a number of homicides in the US versus Kenya. So in the before chart up here, it is showing you that there was over 12,000 homicides in the US. and it was actually less in Kenya.
But that's not the whole story. So if you look on the second graph down here, this one is actually showing you that per capita of 100,000, that the rate of homicide is 3.9% in the US versus the 5.9% in Kenya. So that's what I mean in terms of comparing apples to apples. Also, you want to show the individual parts that make up a whole. Now, by that, in terms of pie charts would be a good way to go.
Pie charts, they're useful when you're dealing with 100% of something. So it's a piece of a pie. 30%, 40%, 30% that's a piece that comes to 100. But that doesn't work that way in this example.
When that doesn't add up to 100, then you don't want to use a pie chart, you want to tap into something else. So in this case, you look at it, they're not adding up to 100%, you're utilizing actually a bar chart to actually look at the future changes in the workplace. Now also the human eye is not as adept to interpreting differences in the area as it is to comparing, let's say, single dimensions.
So in the example here you can see the comparing numbers with drastic differences in magnitude. So there is a large area that is actually 10 squares by 10 that represents 100. And you look at it down to about 25 of that is the candidates that were higher on site. And then from that it is actually down to 9. So you can clearly see with an actual certain area of a real estate. the actual trend, then you're able to interpret that more easily.
Now, also you want to comprehend the relationship between data sets. For that you can use line charts and scatter plots and you can also tap into bubble charts. So correlation also does not necessarily mean causation.
In this case, we're looking at a line chart, actually there's two, and it is looking at the divorce rate in Maine versus the per capita consumption of margin in the US. So even though it looks like there's a correlation, it's not really causation because they actually have nothing to do with each other. So you want to be careful in terms of the way you compare your data. So number nine, how to write copy for your infographic. And this is what it comes down to.
You've established your target audience and that allows you to define the tone. You know the primary purpose of your infographic and also you've established your thesis statement which you're going to back up with data. It's important that it becomes one big idea because that one big idea is what you're utilizing in the infographic.
Infographics are supposed to be snackable so you're really sticking with one focal point primarily. As far as the way you're going to flesh out your narrative. Very similar to the way that I talked about how to create presentations. Compelling presentations, you actually go into the way you tell your story.
I talked about where it's like a curved road. So it's not a straight where it's boring. You actually have ups and downs.
You reach a certain climax and then you have a reversal. And then at the end you have the resolution. So you kind of follow the similar thing. But in the case of infographics, you're actually using numbers, charts and figures to bind your visual story together.
So here's an example. You want to weave the engaging story that uses data. So the data is what's going to be the actual determination here. We look at the world's deadliest animals and we all hear about shark attacks all the time, but you hear very little about mosquitoes and how many people they kill a year. Well surprisingly, sharks only kill about 10 people on average per year.
Lions, hippos, crocodiles, you add them all up, they don't come close to the number of people that is over 750,000. that are killed by mosquitoes every year. So you're leading to an actual surprising conclusion in this infographic. That's what you want to achieve. You also want to craft an airtight argument.
So you want to use facts and figures to back up your statement, such as the example I showed you. And you want to use an idea map that will help you achieve that. So look at this example here. What you're doing is you have a lot of ideas, you come up with a few, and then from there on you work your way up to one main idea.
That main idea can actually be the focal point of your infographic. And of course, you know, based on the target audience, are you educating, are you entertaining, are you inspiring, or are you persuading your audience? Because based on that, you're going to craft your copy in accordance with your intended goal.
Similar to creating the outlines, other outlines, infographic outlines, you follow the same procedure. So you want to just take all the extra content out, focus on the main statements. It needs to be succinct, concise, and needs to go hand-in-hand with the visual elements.
So look at this infographic here. There's a title, there is an introduction, there's the body, and there's a footer. The body could be as long as it wants to be, but you start with the title.
And most people, when they see an infographic, they pay attention to the title first. So the title needs to be catchy, it needs to be an informative headline, and it needs to be interesting enough that the user actually wants to scroll down and reads the rest. Next, you go into the actual state and the problem in the introduction and also why your audience should care.
If you don't connect with your audience between the title and that statement, very likely you're going to have a drop in the interaction and engagement and basically it beats the purpose of the infographic. Then next, you want to go into the body. In the body, you want to develop the narrative and the arguments. You want to have concise text. Again, very important that you utilize visuals where you can to support your text and your content.
So, short text, you want to highlight. with stats and figures and with visual cues. And of course last but not least is the footer, and there is where you're going to have the complete list of information sources, the references, and of course the credit to yourself if you create the infographic. So there you have it. There was the nine steps to follow before you create your infographic.
In the next topic I'm going to go a little bit deeper and we're going to get into the design process of the infographic. So hang bear with me. See you next time.