Went to a seminar on infographics given by Rachel Cox from Relish Research and here’s what I learned…
There are three key elements to an infographic:
- Data
- Design
- Story
Attend to all three and you will have some powerful visual communication (which is the purpose of an infographic).
At the seminar we had a go at sketching out an infographic. It seemed to me that you need to ‘think visually’ in order to communicate visually, and that’s a different way of thinking compared to communicating with words alone. You need to know what you want to say, and then you need to think of how to say it memorably. That’s where the visual thinking comes in…what visual metaphor presents itself that could help tell the story visually… and how well does that metaphor stretch to communicate all the important information?
The narrative of the visual metaphor is ‘all together’ too, there is an over-arching idea that the viewer must see straight away: both context (what am I looking at?) and message (what is it telling me?). It’s fine for there to be detail that the viewer can unpack once they are drawn in to look, but they need to know straight away what they are looking at…
For someone who’s not much of a visual thinking in a world built on image, this was incredibly useful…
