Fast Company recently posted a critique of a misleading infographic on U.S. Demographics. With that in mind, let’s discuss the many things you need to think about if you want to create an infographic for your business.
Infographics are popular shareable content, so it makes sense to consider them in your social media strategy and overall brand communications. Create a great infographic and accompanying blog post, promote it through your social networks, get noticed. Sounds easy, right?
Can your brand communications find the meaningful data in the middle of the noise? Photo by justgrimes
Not so fast. Infographics can make data clear and easy to understand. An infographic that tells a story about data that is hard to conceptualize from text alone can make quite the impact.
A well-designed infographic can pull in readers. But a bad infographic can obscure the story you want to tell and make your business look sloppy. A poorly designed infographic can make it look like you don’t understand what the data means or that you are trying to wrench it out of context.
Infographics can be a form of data journalism for your business. But as this Guardian piece notes, even popular data journalism sites need to to figure out their target audiences. As with your website and all brand communications, infographics and other data-driven pieces need to serve your larger narrative. Edit your ideas accordingly. A cool idea doesn’t help you if it doesn’t fit your needs. People might share it … but your audience won’t.
Make sure your final product conveys the message it is meant to convey. As the Fast Company piece linked above points out, and this blog from Kenneth Field addresses in more detail, a poorly constructed infographic can distort meaningful information into nonsense.
Before you press “publish,” remember that a worthwhile piece must follow the same rules that apply to all your content: make sure your spelling and grammar are correct, and choose a consistent tone.
The takeaway message? Tell your story with data, but do so carefully.
______
Interested in reading more on this topic? Here are some posts about what makes a great — or terrible — infographic.
