What are Infographics?

Information graphics, better known as infographics are graphics that contain intricate information quickly and concisely that display statistical information on a variety of subjects. A fast form of communicative graphical information with short sentences or they can be a single graph with various written information researched by people known as Infographic Designers.

Although Infographics have gain popularity in recent years on the Internet, they have actually been around since prehistoric times. Cave dwellers drew information graphics on cave walls, creating maps and symbols, in most recent years they are constantly within our newspapers and weather forecasts. However, the infographic has exploded with our “click and go” generation and real-time activities, our society has changed and become faster and busier. So naturally, infographics fill our need to read news, in a fashionable and effective amount of time, especially as we insert ourselves further in the online world.

How-To Create an Infographic?

Since our world has become a fast-paced society, it has become increasingly apparent that we need information quickly and therefore we have become reliant on graphics as a form of communication. Such as we need people to be literate in order to read, we now need people to understand with graphicacy, which is the ability to interpret and generate information in a graphical form. Clearly this is a required skill to be able to produce an infographic and even more so for others to understand the infographic appropriately.

The elements required in order to create a proper infographic include the following
You Need to Choose a Type of Infographic:

• Data Infographics – you can use graphing software to create lines, symbols, arrows etc.
• Information – used to compliment various graphics within an infographic.
• Knowledge – that can display statistics that are written in short sentences.

In most cases graphicacy building requires comprehensive skills that are learned and most likely not instinctive, which is great for everyone, since this means that anyone can in fact create an understandable infographic. The core level does require decoding skills of individual graphics or symbols, including abilities to pinpoint the important information that coincide with the overall concept of the infographic. As well as each type of graphic, you want included within the overall infographic this of course; depending on the type of infographic, you choose to create.

You need to have visual skills for the graphics chosen to build an infographic, graphics that are eye catching and mirror your information well. Properly choosing colors that work well together as well as graphics that are inviting and proportioned properly can entice people to click and read your infographic.

How-To Become an Infographic Designer

Infographic designers do require some knowledge on graphic software. The more knowledgeable you are with graphic design, the better your infographics will look. You become a visual artist who researches and collects data to make a visual communication easy for the rest of the population. Understanding that the research and data you collect are JUST as or in some cases more important than the graphics, you use within the infographic. You need to like researching and collecting information, and then formulating the data into an infographic. Many infographic designers will choose a topic, research the information, collect graphics that coincide with the information and then tie it in together as what we know as an infographic.

Quick Tips for Infographic Designers

• Your job is to keep it Simple
• Do not overdo the use of graphics
• Keep your sentences short
• The purpose of an infographic is to convey complex information quickly
• A cool fact is the use of the color red within infographics, which demands primal attention within all of us, even children.

The following is an infographic we developed on the Chilean miner rescue in 2010:

[Via: Chilean Miners Rescue]