Infographics: making data meaningful
The process of creating and visually representing information, once known as data visualisation, has recently become more popularly known as ‘infographics’ or ‘data viz’ if you’re really cool. These intriguing visual representations of report findings, data or knowledge have become very popular in the business world, and when you examine the various reasons why, it’s not surprising.
Infographics allow complex content to be communicated quickly, clearly and often memorably.
Far more eye-catching, interesting and visually engaging than pages and pages of data, their rationalisation down to a number of key indicator statistics, combined with the use of images, and brief bursts of summary text, done effectively, can give an injection of life to even the most snore-inducing report findings.
So if you are considering using your latest report findings to create a stunning graphical representation, exactly where and how can your business benefit from this investment?
1. Searchability
In a world where we now use the internet to constantly search for answers to questions, detailed information neatly packaged as an infographic is hugely eye-catching. Having made your content easier to identify, examine and digest, especially for a search hungry public with a very short attention span, infographics are search result gold, guaranteed to get click-throughs to YOUR site, rather than to your more verbose, less visually striking and possibly even boring competitors.
2. Shareability
By being attractive eye candy, easy to find on the web, and extremely helpful, infographics are also immensely shareable. An extremely effective way of driving traffic to your website, they are great attractors of backlinks from online articles, promoters of link sharing, and generators of embedded links to other websites. People that find them, talk about them and share links to them with their social networks, the net result of which is increased traffic to your website and improved search engine ranking.
3. Credibility
The businesses that create and publish infographics increase the stature of their own corporate profiles by doing so. Companies that publish and promote industry specific information are perceived as credible authorities by their peers. Doing this with meaningful and reader friendly visuals generates credibility … with bells on.
4. Printability
Data visualisation has always been popular in corporate annual reports, in the form of graphics such as bar charts and graphs. Infographics are becoming even more so; representations of data as meaningful graphics make report content far more communicative, and even more impressive and, dare we say it, put a positive spin on results which might suggest otherwise.
Such has been the impact of infographics originally commissioned for digital use, that we get also regularly get requests to produce the artwork as posters and graphics for boardrooms, offices and exhibitions.
The long and short of it is that infographics rock. They’re the zeitgeist, they’re here and now … and they work wonders.
Contact our Brisbane office today and we’ll gladly email you examples of the infographics we’ve produced for the likes of Intel, NineMSN and GE.