Thing 8: Infographics

We touched upon infographics two years ago when we were asked to create one using Easel.ly.  I remember disliking it because in spite of its name I found this tool anything but easy to use.  I was a bit apprehensive having to tackle the subject again but it turns out my fears were unfounded!  I experimented with both Piktochart and Canva and found them super-easy to use.  I ultimately went with Canva because it had a much greater range of free templates to choose from.

I initially thought about turning a report which I prepared a few years ago into an infographic but this didn't work out.  The report was too long and had too many graphs in it, and squeezing it all into an infographic would have resulted in a cluttered mess.  Having said that, I think an infographic would be a great way to make a report or statistical data more digestible.  It would also be a great tool for providing step-by-step instructions for just about anything, or for presenting the key points of a difficult topic in an easy to absorb format.

Having discarded the idea of turning a report into an infographic, I had a moment of panic.  I am not the greatest in the world to come up with random ideas for projects and having wasted the best part of four months meditating on Thing 7 I couldn't afford to repeat that experience.  I therefore decided to go for something very simple and devised an infographic on the benefits of print books, the idea behind it being an attempt to entice people to pick up a real book instead of an e-one.  I found a template that suited the purpose nicely and found it very easy to manipulate.

As with WordPress in Thing 7, the one drawback of the free version of Canva is that the extent to which you can manipulate the template is quite limited.  For instance, I wanted to have the last two lines of the infographic in bold but this was not possible because the template was designed with non-bold text in this area and that was non-negotiable.  Another disappointment of Canva was that while there are plenty of brilliant images to choose from, the range of free ones is so limited as to be almost useless.  In order to make the most of this tool one would need to upgrade from the free version to Pro, or to pay a dollar per image which let's face it isn't a whole hill of beans!  However, Canva does allow you to upload your own images, either by saving them from a file or simply by dragging them across from your desktop, and there are plenty of good free clip-art images available in image banks such as Pixabay (as we learnt in Thing 3!).

This Thing has introduced me to a new way of conveying information and I found it a really enjoyable experience.  Here is the infographic I prepared: