Ries's BALT 318 Blog

We have learned almost everything there is to learn about infographics, now the hard part is putting everything together and actually applying it to real life applications.  Infographics need to be detailed and simple at the same time.  They need to be filled with data and valuable content yet also easily understandable and accessible to as many people as possible.  This is achievable but it requires a lot of knowledge, experience, and skill.  Going a step beyond infographics, dashboards are the next step up from infographics.   Infographics are great marketing tactics and useful tools for businesses in that aspect, but dashboards take infographics to the next level.  Dashboards are more or less better for internal, or business to business use rather than business to consumer.  The reader has to have some general knowledge of the topic in order to understand the information presented by the dashboard, which also means that the creator of ...

Infographics are a great way to communicate information quickly and effectively to an intended audience.  But, in today's day and age, it is becoming harder and harder to tell a story and actually grab people's attention long enough for them to listen to the story.  This is where interactive infographics are so beneficial.  They allow the viewer to dive deeper into the infographic.  They can physically click on things which allows them to connect with the information more.  Also, it is much easier to tell a story with interactive infographics.  Rather than just throwing a whole page of information at the viewer and hoping that they are attracted to the right parts at the right time to understand the story is one difficult task as we have learned over the past few weeks.  Interactive infographics allow the viewer to take in only small pieces of information at a time in whatever order the writer intends, allowing for a much easier story follow....

I talked about thinking like a designer last week, but it is so important to creating infographics that I am going to talk about it this week too!  So, what does thinking like a designer actually mean?  It means exactly what it sounds like it means.  What do designers do?  They create things that are aesthetically pleasing to whoever is intended on seeing the creation.  An interior designer's job is to design a room or house that the person living in the house will be content looking at every day for the rest of their life in that house.  That is a pretty challenging task when you think about it.  Designers create with the viewer in mind.  This is exactly the same for infographics.  If they are not designed directly for the viewer, they will serve no purpose.  For example, if someone was creating an infographic for a hardware store such as Ace Hardware, they are not going to use pinks and purples.  They are also not going t...

Thus far, we have covered the importance of infographics, best practices in creating them, and the importance of simplifying your infographic.  It may seem like we now have all the tools to create perfect infographics, but there is still a lot to learn.  This week, I would like to explain both the why and the how of thinking like a designer when it comes to creating infographics as well as dashboards. Personally, I have struggled so far in my creation of infographics mainly on the information and data side.  Finding out what I actually want to create an infographic on and how to obtain accurate and interesting information and images is quite challenging.  This will become easier once I actually start creating infographics for my specific clients which I will update you guys on very shortly here today. But first, right now I would like to address some more tools for creating effective infographics.  Two weeks ago, we talked about the importance of si...