Thing 21: Creating Infographics

Infographics was a completely new concept for me, or so I thought.  Then I realized  that I am in fact familiar with them, only where I work we tend to call them posters.  It also struck me as I was reading through the course notes that we are actually surrounded by infographics - think traffic signs, for example.

Infographics

Infographs seem like a great way of packaging and disseminating information in an easy to grasp format.  It seems to be particularly well suited to making statistics more palatable and explaining hierarchical systems but I would imagine that it can be applied to almost anything.

I converted our reading room rules into an infograph using Easel.ly and here's the (puny) result:
Reading Room Rules.  I confess I found this web tool easy by name but not by nature!  It took me absolutely forever to figure out that background colours, shapes and text boxes are added or changed simply by clicking on what you want and dragging it onto the canvas - duh!  Also, the free version is quite limited in what it can do.  One thing that really frustrated me was that the tool does not allow you to centre or align images at the press of a button.  You can align text within a text box easily enough but if you want the centre the text box itself you have to make an educated guess.  There is a grid that can be activated  which helps a little but it isn't properly aligned with the poster so you still end up more or less guessing.  Also, if you sign up for this web tool, be prepared to be inundated with emails of handy tips and whatnot!

As useful as infographs are, they are incredibly fiddly and time consuming to create.  You'd really want to be a graphic artist to make full use of them.  This, coupled with the fact that the shelf-life of an infograph is probably quite short - today's news is tomorrow's history - leads me to query their applicability to the day to day activities of a library or an archive.

Image: "Creative Commons Great Britain Road Signs" by Ian Britton licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0