Infographics: A Designer's Approach and Best Practices
Leslie Yang
Just wrapped my first webinar on the topic of infographics. After spending years as an in-house designer, it was great to share all the ideas and insight I'd long wanted to offer to clients and non-designers.
The presentation was for the California Pacific Public Health Training Center (CALPACT), Center for Health Leadership (CHL), UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
Slides below. Here's the PDF.
I make a few points that aren’t in the deck:
- Data visualization and infographics are often used interchangeably. For this presentation, I consider data visualization as the umbrella term for all visual interpretation of data, such as pie charts, line graphs, bar charts and so on. Infographics tell a story with data visuals.
- Design’s job isn’t only to “make it pretty.” True, it is important that the work we do be attractive, but more importantly good design is meant engage you, to compel you to take action.
- When I say visual elements, I mean shapes, color, text, and how you position them. (Designers don’t separate text or blocks of text as visual elements but for this audience of writers and advocates, I’ve kept them separate.)
- Key to a good infographic, is a having a good data story. What's a story? A story is a narrative of what’s happening, narrowed down to the essential points.
- Data + visual elements = data story
I heard back from the meeting presenter and she said that I specifically got a ton of positive and glowing feedback from their post-presentation survey. :)