Do’s and Don’ts of Infographic Design

Illustration by Rafika Aulia Rahma Sari

Infographic is complex and diverse, it provides you information yet giving you images and graphics to explain it. Making infographic content is pretty easy, for designers. They had more experience in organizing graphics and texts. But it’s difficult for other people who tried to make one of them.

When you try to make an infographic, not knowing what things you should put on the content may cause your progress to get stuck. But relax, we provide you the do and don’ts on making infographic content. Let’s get started.

Wireframe your work

• Do: making infographics need a plan. Wireframe the ideas and create a storyboard to ease your design later. First, outline the topic you already picked. Then, you can start to concept storyboards about visual and the design of your infographic based on the outline before. After that, create the visualization from the outline points. You will get easier to make an infographic if you can manage and organize your work from the beginning. The other benefit of well concept infographics could make the readers more amazed and easier to understand.
• Don’t: Never create infographics just from the idea/topic without any guidelines. Don’t start your work unless you have already figured out everything. When you make designs without any storyboard concept, it may get stuck in the middle of your progress. Or even did not match with the topic you have thought about before. A work without a proper plan may struggle you out. Remember, guidelines will keep your work organized.

Balanced visual and text portion

• Do: Make a balanced portion between text and visual e.g. photos, icons, and graphics. When making an infographic design you need to give an equal portion both for the text and visual content. Texts are supposed to give information about the data or the topic that you are going to explain. Whilst the visual is used to ease readers understanding the information. You can choose more specific sentences to narrow your explanation. Make sure the readers understand your infographic yet pleasured with the visualization you provided on it.
• Don’t: Too many explanations with lack of visualization or too much visualization without proper explanation. If you make an infographic with too much text, readers will easily get bored from it. They will skip your infographic content after knowing it has too many paragraphs. Otherwise, readers will be confused if you put too much visualization with minimum information about what’s going on there.

Be creative and make it interesting

• Do: Create a stunning visualization out of data or the topic you have already owned. The visual aspect of infographic content is very important. A good data visualization attracts more people to read your infographics. You can create many kinds of digital artwork such as illustration or graphic design to visualize the given information. If you can’t make your visual things you can download or buy from online graphic resources. There are a lot of online resources that provide visual content like freepik, vecteezy, unsplash, or pinterest. Make sure to use the legal one from each media you will use to make an infographic. Creative graphic and visual aspects of the infographic can boost the reader’s response. First impressions matter.
• Don’t: Never use generic chart graphics. Don’t make your infographics look like an excel presentation. People will be easily bored after their first impression. Infographic stands as a digital age content to spread information. So, many readers will choose which information they want to read. If you lose at their first impression, they may not come again to read more of your infographics.

Elements

• Do: use the same-styled and related icons so it can be more matched and looks good on the visualization. Use high-definition images on your design. Related icons, text, or graphic styles will make your infographic design look more simple yet attractive to the readers. Many great designs come from simplicity.
• Don’t: Using unmatched icons with the topic and too many different style icons could make your design look bad. Low-quality images also make your design look terrible. Avoid creating too complicated designs with too many elements, readers can be confused and lose their interest to read or even look at your infographic content.

Every color matter

• Do: Pick the right colors for your design. Use color combinations such as tri-color schemes or any other current color palettes. Try to match the color themes with your design topic so they can be related to each other.
• Don’t: Don’t experiment on new color combinations if you don’t know before. Wrong color combinations may make your design unattractive even become cringe. Unrelated color themes with the topic also make the readers confused. Don’t make an infographic about the disaster but you put colorful themes and funny fonts on it, it’s terrible.

Sizing and application

• Do: Be sure you make an optimized design that could be applied in every platform that published your infographics. Keep an eye on every design size because different platforms need different sizes. In this decade, people almost spend their time on gadgets. Digital media have become more popular than printed media. It makes infographic content have an important role to give information through many people. More people means more gadgets. So, make sure you have already optimized your infographic so it can be applied to more kinds of gadgets.
• Don’t: Applied wrong design size on an unmatched platform. For example, you can’t post your infographic content on Instagram unless it is on a 1:1 scale. If you have 3:4 or many other scales, it will be cropped and look terrible. So, if you have the infographic design for a web page platform, make sure you have another design size for social media like Instagram, Facebook, etc.

Contributor: Abdul Hamid