We have witnessed how viral infographics can be and how these gorgeous graphics could help in businesses. But how do we create infographics?
Anol Bhattacharya, CEO at GetIT Comms has gone the extra mile to share with us a step-by-step process to creating one. However, keep in mind that the process is just a guideline. It isn’t meant to be followed religiously.
“It’s a basic process flow for creating an info-diagram. There is no fixed time limit, or rather, it depends,” said Bhattacharya.
Here we go:
1. Collection: Collection of all the raw materials for the infographics – such as PowerPoint slides, White Papers, face-to-face interviews (multiple sessions), network diagrams etc. The more details you dive in and expand on in this phase, it’ll make it that much easier for you to develop the infograpahics in the later stage.
2. Identifying the objectives: Who are the target audience? What’s their range of technical knowledge? What are their main pain points? What we want to highlight to them? Its great if you can sketch a persona.
3. Classification: Grouping the infrastructures into physical spaces. Grouping can be done by process phases, physical locations, activities or be cause-effect based.
4. Blueprinting: Time to draw individual groups (pencil sketch) with the technical details. It’ll also give you a rough idea about the space you’ll have for textual description or labeling.
5. Space planning: Basically – doing a collage i.e. sticking together different A4 size papers – the photocopies of the individual groups.
6. Planning the interrelations: Between the groups. How the groups will be connected? The best way is to work with a theme. For example, in the case of the Quick Start Guide to Social Media, we choose the theme of a laboratory, then defined each group (process phases in this case) according to the theme in different visual metaphors.
7. Go digital: time to draw the infographic on the computer; we used Freehand and Flash. Any Vector graphics editor should do the job.
8. Integrate: the purpose of any infographic is to bring everyone to the same page and tell a complete story. Integration of different elements to tell a coherent story is the most vital step in the creation of an infographic.
9. Optimize detail: Add in the useful details, get rid of the extras, work out the balance between aesthetics and usability.
10. Labeling: Copywriting and inserting the labels; this is a tricky part – you need to be specific and clear whilst avoiding big chunks of text.
11. Coloring and Typography: Effective typography is not only for corporate identity or enrichment of visual appearance, it also helps you to represent the bound emotions of your graphics.
12. Iteration: Varying the colors, reducing the saturation of what is less important and increasing it for the most relevant data, modifying the typography, the size of fonts, eliminating everything that doesn’t contribute to showing and clarifying the data (irrelevant grids, redundant data, and unnecessary labels) without losing relevant information sometimes provides surprisingly improved results.
Catch all featured infographics here.
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