Create professional-looking infographics for free

From the perspective of someone who is not a designer, making an infographic that is beautiful and effective can seem like an impossible task…. so it is better to leave it to qualified professionals.

But that doesn’t have to be true. With thousands of infographic designs up their sleeves, the talented designers at Venngage have developed a very robust system for making infographics, and we’ve turned that system into a foolproof guide to teaching non-designers how to make an infographic in 5 steps.

One way to communicate a large amount of information is to create an infographic , which is basically a visual representation of a group of data. Because they are made up of images, it is easier to see all the information at a first glance. In business, they are commonly used to share information gathered from study or research, although they actually have many other applications.

You can use an infographic to compare products, diagram sales, or simply entertain your customers. It could also be used to show your work flow, your financial data or even explain programs to your employees. The limit is your imagination.

But if you don’t have graphic skills don’t worry, generating one of these doesn’t involve a lot of work and you don’t have to pay a lot of money either.

We share three programs that can help anyone create an infographic, free or at a very low cost:

If you want to make an infographic that attracts attention, summarizes and informs, but requires the design skills of a youngster, this guide is for you.

How to make an Infographic?

1. Choose the topic of the infographic

The first step in making an infographic is choosing the topic of the infographic. Some general examples of topics for making infographics are:

• The explanation of a concept
• The explanation of a technology
• Statistical data
• Summary of a document

It is ideal that the idea is popular on the Internet and especially on social networks since this will facilitate the virality of the infographic when it is completed. Monitoring your target audience’s Twitter and Facebook accounts will help you identify the hot topics on social media.

2. Identify the sources of information for the infographic

• A data collection process must be carried out on the subject to be addressed. It is very important to register the sources of information since they are an important element in the infographic.
• Some sources of information to consider are: Google, blogs, Youtube, Slideshare, Twitter, Wikipedia, electronic newspapers, specialized sites, etc.
• The information sources may also include online or offline surveys carried out by us.
• A very important aspect in this step is to validate that the information collected is true since there are unreliable sources of information. The .gov and .edu sites are usually very good sources of information.

3. Organize your ideas

• It is important to organize the information collected by grouping it by topic and subtopics, for this a concept map program can be useful.
• Aspects that are not very relevant or uninteresting should be discarded, this will prevent us from drowning in the sea of ​​information collected in the previous point.

4. Create the gray infographic (sketch)

• Once the information collected has been organized, you should start making an outline of the infographic. There is a fairly good and free program to do this activity: Mockflow.com .
• It is possible that during this stage we do not realize the need to discard more information that we consider is not essential to convey the idea that we want to capture in the infographic.
• This stage is fundamental since it will be the one that gives creativity and clarity to the infographic.

5. Design the infographic

The design should take into account:

• Original style : Avoid copying graphic concepts from other infographics.
• Integration : An infographic should be graphically rich, avoiding designing it with a lot of text.
• Color : Colors with good contrast should be used to facilitate reading. A great tool that makes color selection easy is color.adobe.com
• Fonts : An infographic should have creative use of fonts and letter sizes. The Dafont.com site  contains a wide variety of fonts that can be taken as a guide.
• Icons : An infographic must contain simple images (icons) in order to communicate properly. The site Freepik.es  has very good material.

6. Use tools to create infographics

Top free tools for creating infographic elements:

Free Infographic Maker

DesignCap’s infographic maker helps you create awesome infographics to visualize your data and information with great ease, no graphic design skill needed. Choose a template, add your information, and whip up a professional looking infographic with handy editing tools and abundant graphic resources.

Why should you create an infographic?

Traditionally, infographics have been considered a difficult tool to make, although very useful for creating ordering information, making it easier to understand or illustrating presentations and work. Nowadays, and thanks to applications or computer programs, anyone can create them.

Infographics are a better way to:

1. Communicate the story you are telling
2. Make your content easy to understand
3. Grab the viewer’s attention
4. Increase brand awareness and drive traffic
5. Create viral content with compelling images and graphics

Infogram is the easiest way to communicate complex ideas in a visually appealing way

For more design related work like shown below, visit www.designcap.com

If you know of any additional tools to create infographics, write them in the comments.