The challenge of creating infographics
Recently, I created an infographic to help summarize OPPI’s annual Business Plan. This included a lot of nested information, assorted numeric data, and key talking points they wanted to get across. The challenge was to condense and organize the information as much as possible to be more easily understood and digestible for learners who might not have read the whole original document.
1. Writing
The more I worked on this infographic, the more text I had to excise from the content document, which itself was already reduced from the business plan document to its bare essentials. The point of an infographic is to take a large amount of information and convey it in as few words as possible, so it make sure the words that you are keeping are the right ones.
2. Categorizing
Since the content was so varied, we had to organize it into several categories so the information could be sorted into understandable chunks. First, everything was divided into information on the Strategic Plan, and information on the Business Plan. Then each of these two sections were further subdivided under several key points, each of which was accompanied by an illustration. Each of the key points were also reinforced using their branding colours; one for each key point.
3. Design
The first half of the infographic was easier to design as each key point of the Strategic Plan contained 3 important pieces of information that could be organized neatly into a grid. The second half was more of a challenge as each key point contained anywhere between one and five pieces of information. Also, one of the key points referenced the first half of the infographic, and another contained a subheading with its own information.
This required a different approach to laying out of the information. In the end, the page was divided into different sized sections for each point to accommodate the differing amounts of information, but maintained a good flow of text and imagery in a diagonal direction. I also reused the same colours associated with the first part of the infographic in the second part of the infographic to maintain consistency and to refer to the previous categories.
For more on other infographics we’ve created, check out these articles – The Importance of Good Management, Our Process to create eLearning, and Infographics for Microlearning.
