Top 5 Professional tips for a freelance infographic designer
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| Freelance Infographic Designer |
work of Freelance Infographic Designer. They're perfect for making boring and complex data more engaging and easier to understand.
But you have to be a designer to make infographics, right? Wrong! Anybody can create infographics even if you don't have much design experience!
All you need is an idea, some data, and the right tools so let's get started! Hi, there my name's Sara and I'm the blog editor over at Venngage infographics.
In this article, my goal is to make designing infographics as easy and painless for you as possible.
I'm going to walk you through the five steps for planning and creating your own infographic.
I'm also going to give you some helpful tools so you can get started designing right away. Okay so first let's talk about
What makes a freelance infographic designer effective.
An effective infographic will be engaging, eye-catching, but also make information a lot easier to understand than if you were to just present a bunch of data in text format.
So let's dive into how you can create your own infographic. The five steps for creating your own infographic:
- Identify the goal of your infographic.
- Collect data for your infographic.
- Visualize the data.
- Layout your infographic using an infographic template.
- Add some style to your design by customizing your template.
1. Identify the goal of your infographic
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| Freelance Infographic Designer |
The first thing you need to do is identify the goal of your infographic and there should be a more specific goal than just something like make data engaging for the reader.
At its core, every viral infographic solves a burning problem.
A burning problem is a problem that your target audience faces in their day to day lives or a question that they really want to be answered.
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| Freelance Infographic Designer |
Once you've identified what the burning problem you want to answer in your infographic will be you can use a question pyramid to help you flesh out the ideas and come up with some supporting questions.
these questions will give you a specific direction to follow when you're finding data for your infographic and when you're laying out your information so here's an example of what a question pyramid could look like and let's say I want to create an infographic about cat overpopulation and adoption.
because I really like animals so the burning problem could be how can we solve the cat overpopulation problem in Canada and a couple of supporting questions could be you know.
how many cats are there currently in shelters and what are the best ways to reduce cat overpopulation and then a couple of probing questions that can help us hone in on the problem.
could be you know has the number of cats and shelters been reduced at all over the years or how much time is being allocated currently to addressing the cat overpopulation problem. Alright, so let's go on to
2.collecting data for your infographic
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| Freelance Infographic Designer |
If you already have a set of data that you want to use then you're set you can just jump right ahead to step three, but if you don't have any data yet then you need to go do the legwork and you need to find data yourself.
Here are some strategies that I like to use to collect data for my infographics: the first strategy is to refine your Google searches.
Google is often the best place to start when you're looking for data you can use. Quotation marks to search for an exact phrase.
you can use a minus sign to exclude specific terms from your search, you can add data to the end of your search phrase, or you can add a data specific file format to your search phrases such as CSV XLS or TSV.
Use of existing data repositories for a freelance infographic designer
So Google is a great place to start, but a lot of the time the results that you get will be messy and require a lot of sorting through.
That's why it's a good idea to have some go-to data repositories bookmarked where you can also start your search Alright so let's move on to
3. visualizing your data
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| Freelance Infographic Designer |
So now that you've collected a bunch of good data points you need to sort through them and pick out the ones you want to include and then you need to figure out the best way to visualize that data.
at Venngage we recommend using the ICCORE method to help you pick the best charts and visuals for your data. ICCORE stands for inform, compare, change, organize, reveal relationships, and explore.
Let's break down each one. First, inform. This is when you want to convey an important message or data point that doesn't require many contexts to explain.
For example, if you want to highlight an important percentage, a donut chart or a pictogram works well. Next compare.
Similarities or differences between values or parts of a whole
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| Freelance Infographic Designer |
There's a ton of different types of charts that you could use for this to compare independent values.
You could use a bar chart or a bubble chart, and to compare parts of a whole you could use a pie chart or a pictogram. And the next change.
This is when you want to show trends over time and space. So the obvious choice for this would be a timeline or a line chart, but if you want to show spatial data you could also use a chloroplast map.
A chloroplast map. Klare-holy crap that's hard to say. A choropleth map uses different shading and coloring to indicate the value of a property or quantity in an area,
so, for example, a darker color could indicate a higher population density while a lighter color could indicate a lower population density and if you want to show a change over time in space you can use a series of maps to compare.
In freelance infographic designer show groups, patterns, rank, or order
If you want readers to look up specific values use a table. Meanwhile to organize groups you can use a mind map or a Venn diagram and then we have to reveal relationships.
So this is when you want to show more complex relationships between things, for example, if you want to display two variables for a set of data you could use a scatter plot or if you want to visualize multiple sets of related data you could use a multi-series plot.
And finally, we have Explorer. This is when you want readers to explore the data and discover insights for themselves. The possibilities for how you can do this are virtually endless.
For example, you could create an interactive infographic that allows your readers to drill down and look at specific data points. That being said this type of chart is often more time-consuming and costly to create so that's why if you're a beginner I recommend that you start with one of the other types of charts that we've recommended.
I haven't mentioned every type of chart that you could use for each ICCORE goal, but don't worry we've listed a ton of different charts that you could use with plenty of examples in the blog post that accompanies this video, which I of course link to in the description box below.
Ok so now we're on to step 4: lay out the information of your freelance infographic designer work. So now that you've collected all of your data, you've decided what types of charts and visuals you're going to use, it's time to put it all together in an infographic.
So there are a couple of things that you should keep in mind when laying out your information. The first is to create a natural flow of information. Basically think of your infographic as a story with a beginning a middle and an end.
4.Start latout your infographic
The start of your infographic should lay out what people can expect to learn from the infographic and then you put in all of your supporting questions your charts and your data and then you send it off with a conclusion or a call to action.
The second tip that I recommend is to use a grid to layout your information. This will just help you keep all of the parts of your infographic organized and aligned. Generally, it's easiest to organize your infographic into columns or squares.
Here are some examples: you could use a single column layout to give your infographic a linear flow, or you could use a two-column layout to compare information in your freelance infographic designer work.
If you want some more examples of different types of layouts that you could use, just check out the blog post that goes with this Article.
But the easiest way to layout your infographic is to start with a template. A template will give you a solid foundation to work with then all you have to do is put in your information and customize your design.
The type of freelance infographic designer that you pick will depend on the type of information that you want to visualize. So returning to my cat adoption infographic.
I know I'm going to want to showcase a bunch of statistics and facts so I'm going to pick a statistical infographic template that will allow me to show off those numbers using charts and icons and bold text and.
then I can simply paste my text into the existing template layout and I can adjust the sizes of the fonts and the shapes and move around any parts that I want to move around.
So I think that this layout works quite well for my data and I don't really need to move anything around I'm just going to shorten the infographic a little bit.
So to do that I'll unlock these boxes and then I can select and delete the content from the boxes and delete the boxes themselves and then I can adjust the length of the infographic by going to customize page size.
And then I don't need so many text boxes up here, so I'll just delete a couple and then input the first statistic that I want to share. And once again I'll adjust the size of the font so that it better fits.
5. Add some style to your infographic
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| Freelance Infographic Designer |
This is pretty much the best part of designing in my opinion.
Once you've laid out all of your information in a way that flows and that makes sense you can spice up your design by changing the fonts, the colors, and the visuals.
So returning to my cat overpopulation freelance infographic designer work I want to first replace the icons so that they better fit the theme.
So I'll remove the ones from the template and search for new icons that fit. For example a little cat.
And thenI'll change the color of the icon so that it fits the design, and then I also want to swap out these icons, and here I think I want to put a bunch of cats, so I'll actually use a pictogram (otherwise known as an icon chart) and I'll search for a cat.
Drag it onto the canvas and then I can adjust the number of rows and columns that I want to show. Resize it so that it fits, and then I can also adjust the color ratio of the pictogram so that they're all the same color, and once again change the color of the icons so that they better fit the design.
And now I think I want to display one of the statistics as a chart.
So because the statistic shows change over time, I'm going to use a line chart and I think I want to put a background so that it pops more, so I'm going to drag a square on to the canvas and then push it back behind the chart.
And then I'm going to input my data so I'll just remove the template data and put in the years and the percentages. And now I can customize the style of the charts so that it fits the design.
So for example I can change the font colors I can also change the font size so that it pops more from the page and I can also change the line width so that it really stands out.
And then I also don't want to forget to include my branding, so I'll use the Brand Kits to find my logo and drag it directly onto the canvas.
As a general rule of thumb pick a decorative font for the title of your infographic and the section headers and then pick a more basic and pared-down font for the paragraph text.
How freelance infographic designer picking colors
So when it comes to picking colors for your infographic pick 3 to 5colors that complement each other well and then use that as your color palette.
But color isn't just about making your infographic design look pretty, it could also be a valuable tool to help you communicate more effectively.
For example, you can use color to highlight important points in your infographic and you can also use color to group related elements.
So here are a few more important tips to keep in mind when you're designing your infographic.
The first is to leave plenty of white space. So white space, also known as negative space, is the empty space around the elements in your design.
Leaving plenty of white space will give all of the text and images in your infographic room to breathe and it'll also prevent your design from looking cluttered.
Also, make sure that the elements in your design are aligned. A grid can help you align all of the text and the images so they're nice and neat and in place.
And this one is really important when it comes to picking colors and fonts and images for your design to make sure that everything is consistent.
Consistency is key when it comes to design. So here is my finished infographic. It's got a nice combination of contrasting colors, some bold font to emphasize the information, and some icons and the text is nice and neatly aligned and the icons are all roughly the same size.
So when I'm happy with my design I can go ahead and publish it, share it, or download it in whichever format that I would prefer and I can start sharing my freelance infographic designer work experience with the world.
1. identify the goal of your freelance infographic designer work
2. identify the goal of your infographics collects the data for your infographic visualize.
The data using charts and other visuals layout your infographic using an infographic template and spruce up your design by customizing the fonts colors and icons you can find all of the templates shown in this Article plus a ton more of beginner-friendly templates.
in our templates library just go to Venngage dot comm slash templates.
I hope that this has made the prospect of creating your own infographic a little less scary! If you have any questions about infographic design or how to get started or how to visualize data please don't hesitate to leave a comment and we'll do our best to answer them all! So now I'm curious are you a cat person or a dog person? Let me know in the comments. Happy designing! Thanks for visiting do subscribe...!!
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