What's an Infographic Anyway?

You know you can produce a compelling infographic when you have the right data. Whether you’ve got some great statistics that push a narrative or a visual representation of a complex process—an infographic is in essence the visual display of data. Thank you, Edward Tufte.

Once you have an idea — or more likely, you have an asset that’s part of a larger campaign (maybe it’s white paper, a video, or an article) — you can start to break everything down into a script.

The script is where you find out if the idea will work in the format you’ve chosen.

After getting a script together (or a copy deck or copy doc or whatever the people you work with call the thing with all the little words in it), I'll meet with an illustrator or designer and project manager to discuss the imagery.

The copy usually needs to be tweaked once we have some ideas for the visuals. While I’m working on that, the illustrator puts together a storyboard and once we’re all happy with that, the storyboard — which includes all the copy and imagery — goes to the client to review and approve.

With that done, the final images are created and the motion designer gives the infographic life.

That’s just one way to do an infographic. Another way is to create a more static and traditional marketing asset version. Basically, whatever goes into Adobe comes out as a shareable or printable PDF.

After writing the script, I’ll have a quick meeting with the illustrator to make sure we’re on the same page about what we’ll be delivering to the client. This might mean tweaking the copy so I can have a script ready for client feedback.

Once approved, it’s off to design. I find that a lot of clients are more visual oriented and will almost always have more feedback once the illustrator has worked their magic.

And it all starts with the words. Or well maybe it all starts with an idea that we know has legs.