The current level of online technology just refuses to bow down. In a world overflowing with data, marketers are always in the mood to try new strategies and ideas to grab and retain audiences’ attention.

Whether you are a corporation trying to pitch your business idea, a designer trying to impress your boss, an organization that needs to effectively communicate the issues they care about, or an educator trying to give lessons to the students. No matter what you are occupied with, engaging the audience by effectively simplifying your idea or thoughts in a presentation form is an effective way to keep them excited, and one way to achieve this feat is through infographics.

As per Wikipedia, Information graphics, or infographics, are graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly.

The use of infographics in business and various fields is snowballing because of its ability to provide a great amount of complex information concisely, juggling through visually appealing elements that draw attention.

Why Infographics?

With over 65% of the population identified as a visual learner and content scanner, the state of communications is increasing visually. Over 60% of businesses today use infographics, mostly for marketing and sales purposes.

Outperforming video, blogs, articles, and podcasts, visual communication is by far the most common delivery method of advertising and marketing messages today.

Among business that used infographics in the past years, most of them agree to the fact that infographics are an essential business tool that can help drive better sales in the long run. In fact, nearly three-quarters of marketers rely on visuals in their social media messaging and this trend is not stopping any soon.

But why do infographics work so well?

Infographic is a trend to catch because 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are known to improve learning and retention by 400%. In simple words, with infographics, you create content that can be easily digested by your target audience. Moreover, there are many more advantages of using an infographic representation as one of your business hacks. Here are a few:

Infographics make Comparison Easier

While a comparison can be difficult to express with words, infographics does the job for you. When drawing comparisons, infographics help you organize similarities and differences by creating parallels that add to the information being presented. Such way of presenting information is much clear and pleasing to eyes.

For example, here is an infographic comparing Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The infographic is effective because it could be understood without you appearing to break the sweat.

Is one better way to present facts

Sometimes facts may not sound interesting enough when penned on paper or organized in a simple list. The designer’s interpretation of the facts, and how he/she could aesthetically organize those in an infographic, can attract readers and turn an uninteresting piece of writing into an engaging and informative piece of art.

Explaining how something works

Skilled designers are often dedicated to creating infographics that visually explains features of complex products like cameras, mobile phones or a TV. The idea is to reveal the mechanics of a device, explaining how it really works.

The simplicity of an infographic design makes it easier to explain the function of each piece intact in the device. In the example below, designer Jing Zhang explains each element of a product helping a user by giving a better overview of the functionality of the product while accurately revealing how they work.

Simple explanation for a complicated concept

The core purpose of an infographic is to simplify a complicated concept or an idea so that it could be easily understood. The idea makes greater sense, especially when presenting an impression of a topic instead of in-depth specifications.

For example bitcoin. A person with a basic background knowledge of economics can easily understand the term, but someone who is not familiar might need a detailed insight into the topic and believe me just words cannot do it.

Moreover, so many different ideas, elements, and factors go into the concept thus motion graphics used to present the concept will work better than presenting the same information in words.

Infographics can easily catch attention

A research published in the Newspaper Research Journal Winter presents the importance of graphical or visual elements quite well:

“On their own, text and graphics are both useful yet imperfect methods for communication. Written language allows an almost infinite number of word combinations that allow deep analysis of concepts but relies heavily on the reader’s ability to process that information. Graphics may be easier for the reader to understand but are less effective in the communication of abstract and complicated concepts. … combining text and graphics allows communicators to take advantage of each medium’s strengths and diminish each medium’s weaknesses.”

Humans are visual creatures who get attracted to visual elements more often. When words fail to pull the attention and imagination, then perhaps visual elements like those that Infographics does the job better.

A Guide to Create Engaging Infographics

With the success of infographics, it cannot be denied visuals play a crucial role in keeping the audience engaged. However, how this could be done?

Shape your exploration

Key points and supporting details are the two building blocks of any infographic presentation. Thus, the better distinguish the two are, the better will an infographic look altogether.

Here are the factors that will help you figure out what data to keep, and what to edit out:

• Clearer goals. Having a clear goal in mind can save a lot of your time and will also help you identify the right data you need to include in an infographic. Try summarizing your presentation to specific one-word parts. This will give you a better idea of what facts you will need to back it up.
• Identify the audience. Infographics and presentation decks should take note of what is relevant to their audience. The infographics with the most traction, most attention, and most virility, make it to the top. Think as an audience and try to prioritize what could be more important and what needs to be excluded.
• Draft an outline. Once you have decided your point of focus and collected the needed information, the next task is to organize it in order of importance. This lets you sort the most thought-provoking information from the less significant ones.

The end goal is to inform, and all the three steps mentioned above will lead you to your destination.

Do not Mess up your presentation

Infographic is a two-word concept ‘info’ and ‘graphics’. You can collect a lot of engaging information from various resources but presenting the same through graphics is another challenge. The human mind is meant to process one information at a time and with that in mind, you should layout your infographic in a way that it does not look like a mess.

Here is how to do that:

• Add white space. White spaces must be used at regular intervals to make an infographic more pleasing to the eyes. Moreover, white space helps people to focus their attention on visuals and lets you arrange content according to your intended goals.
• Headline is important. If you don’t have a powerful headline, your infographic simply won’t get viewed. This principle is the same as with a great blog article, i.e. it should be short, and thought provoking.
• See in your mind’s eye. You need to come over charts and bar graphs. Again, think as an audience. Try to create something that is never seen before. Once you are into infographics, it is highly recommended to get more creative with your visuals.
• Length. Infographics are supposed to be big. We get that. But not too big. A limit length of 8,000 pixels is more than enough. Anything longer, and your user will have too much information to go through.
• Make it readable. Although you will want to make appealing visuals, make sure your data is readable at a glance. Avoid over-embellishments by keeping your visuals simple enough. Use appropriate font size and style for your typography.

Specify your data

Supporting your thoroughly-researched data with facts is necessary. On the other hand, engaging images certainly help to pique people’s interest.

Make your contents as precise and concise as possible with these tips:

• Tag the info. One of the easiest ways to distinguish the objects on your presentation is to label them. This works arguably well if you are presenting statistics, which can be very technical.
• Do not overgeneralize. The mind may be designed to avoid processing exaggerated images, but making your visual presentation clear to the viewer is just as important to get your message across clearly.
• Explain connections. Do not just drop any information anywhere as it could be confusing. Your presentation needs a narrative hierarchy – just like an essay – that connects each of your points. Remember, a hierarchical presentation is a smoother presentation.

Here are infographics examples you can take lesson from.

Time line Infographics

Timeline infographic works great when you want to tell the history of any industry or brand. The updated time period in specific order and icons focusing on the key highlight of the year looks simple and clear.

When you need to show only data

When you have new data to reveal to the world, you can use an infographic to display that data as part of a cohesive, visual narrative. And that is exactly what the “Data Geek” template is for. You can choose what type of graph you want to include according to your needs.

Flow Chart Infographics

While a flowchart infographic may appear simple and fun, but a lot of thought and planning need to go into making sure the different sections flow into each other in a logical way.

Applications for Making Engaging Infographic Presentations

The benefits are plenty thus; you might feel the need to use infographic in your next presentation to make it more promising. The only problem is infographics that look like they were simple to make are often tiring.

Here are some infographics tools you can try as an alternative to Photoshop and another time-consuming infographic maker.

Visme

Free (Basic); $12/month (Standard); $20/month (Complete)

Visme is a super cool infographic tool geared towards creating interactive presentations, infographics, ad banners, animations, customer layouts, and more. The free tool has an extensive library full of templates, shapes, icons, fonts, and objects to choose from.

With Visme, you can turn your thoughts into an interactive infographic with built-in animations. When you share your infographic as a URL, visitors will see the animated infographic upon visiting and as they scroll down the page depending on the animations, you have set.

You can also directly insert data values to change the charts and graphs. Another plus point is that it is specially priced for teachers and students. Which means it is affordable for all of us online entrepreneurs as well. Visme lets you take it for a test drive with their free account alternative.

Canva

Price: Free; from $9.95/month (Canva for Work)

One of the most uniquely and aesthetically designed websites; Canva is an easy to use online tool that aims to train both designers and non-designers to come up with great work.

Canva is an infographic maker that offers users a vast library of images, icons, fonts, and features to choose from. Canva will guide you with a brief tutorial once you are in. Once you are through with that, you can move on to creating your project whether it be a presentation, Facebook cover photo, business card, ad, poster, banner, or a retina-ready infographic.

You can find infographic templates created by others in the Canva community which you can start using for free.

Even if you are not that tech savvy, you won’t find big learning curve because every design element can be dragged and dropped it into place. There are many layout varieties to choose from, countless font choices, and over one million images available from Canva that will boost your creativity.

Venngage

Price: Free (Students); from $19/month (Pro)

Unlike many other services who offer to create slideshows, reports, and wireframes, Venngage promises that it can help you to create a beautiful infographic in just three easy steps. Similar to Canva, Venngage offers you a few different options to pick from in terms of what it is you want to create.

The templates they offer are beautiful, and the resources accompanying the templates such as charts, maps, and icons seamlessly integrate into the stylistic theme of the templates.

Venngage offers an advanced design tool to provide you with complete control of the graphics and objects in your infographic. When you are ready, you can share your infographic on your social channels, embed on the web, or download as an image or PDF.

Piktochart

Price: Free (Basic); from $12.50/month (Lite)

Piktochart is an infographic and presentation tool that enables you to turn boring data into engaging infographics with just a few clicks. Templates are updated on a weekly basis and include icons, photos/videos, charts, and maps that you can drag and drop into your infographic. Thus, no need to surf the net for hours to find what you need.

Moreover, you can pick from a few different formats, including a traditional infographic size (tall and skinny), presentation size (for slide decks), poster, and report.

Piktochart custom editor also lets you do things like modify color schemes and fonts, insert pre-loaded graphics and upload basic shapes and images. Its grid-lined templates make it easy to align graphical elements and resize images proportionally.

You can also integrate your own data to their built-in spreadsheet layout or from other services like Survey Monkey. Once done, you can embed your infographic to your site, present it as a slideshow on a browser, or download and print it as a PDF.

It is interesting to be at the crossroads where you can consider trying number ideas to make your work more presentable. Try these simple tips and tricks and you will probably nail your next presentation.