Infographics: Telling the Visual Story

Infographics are fast becoming a clever and useful tool for librarians to tell their stories and give sometimes dry data a visual style. Infographics help convey a message that is easy for the reader to digest. There are many different types of infographics for different uses. You can use Adobe Illustrator or even Powerpoint to create your own infographics. Or, if that might be too much work, there are plenty of free infographic generator websites that can help put your ideas and data into an appealing visual display. At first, infographics may have looked like a way to dumb down information for those with short attention spans. However, infographics and the concept of using them has turned to sharing and displaying chunks of information and identifying connections from various data points. To make a good infographic, it is important to know what story you want to convey and to pull together the various types of data, text, and images available to you. It can be helpful to sketch out your ideas on paper. This can give you a better idea of what you want to convey and how. As Greg Beato explains in his Reason magazine article “The Age of the Infographic:”

…a good infographic doesn't just pair interesting statistics with fun illustrations. Instead, it concretizes otherwise inscrutable connections and causes and thus makes context, nuance, and complexity easier to digest. What is the association between fast food restaurant prevalence and community obesity rates? How does education level correlate with life span? A well-constructed infographic can answer such questions in vivid and concise fashion.

For more reading, Karen Holt of librarianlifestyle.com has a great post “How to Create Your Own Infographics.” And here are some more examples from the library world:

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