How to Make an Infographic: The Ultimate Guide

Here are the 9 steps you need to follow to make an infographic that stands out:

1. Choose the audience of your infographic.
2. Define the goals you’re trying to achieve.
3. Choose a topic for your infographic.
4. Collect the data and information for your infographic.
5. Fact-Check everything and cite your sources.
6. Decide how to visualize your data.
7. Set the tone for your infographic.
8. Write the copy and create a textual outline.
9. Create a wireframe of your infographic.

Want to learn more about each of the steps outlined above?

Keep reading.

 

9 Steps to Making an Informative Infographic

• Step #1: Pinpoint the Audience of Your Infographic
• Step #2: Define the Goal of Your Infographic
• Step #3: Choose a Topic for Your Infographic
• Step #4: Collect the Data and Information for Your Infographic
• Step #5: Fact-Check Everything and Cite Your Sources
• Step #6: Decide How to Visualize Your Infographic Data
• Step #7: Set the Tone for Your Infographic
• Step #8: Write the Copy and Create a Textual Outline
• Step #9: Sketch a Wireframe of Your Infographic

 

How to Make an Infographic: Planning

Before you start designing your infographic, you need to do a few things.

Taking these first steps to plan your infographic design can mean the difference between an amazing infographic that actually works and thousands of other mediocre graphics.

Simply throwing your content onto a template is great if you don’t care about your brand, your message or your goals.

Do the legwork to make the best infographic design possible; it’s just as important as the UX research for your new website or app.

To help you out, here’s an infographic on how to plan your infographic design. You can read about each step in more detail below.

 

 

1. Pinpoint the Audience of Your Infographic

Defining the audience for your infographic is easy if you’re creating one for your brand or product. You have probably already done the work to know who your audience is and who you create content for.

On the other hand, if this infographic is meant for another audience, you need to clearly define who it’s for.

By knowing who your audience is, it’s easier to decide on the tone for the copy, the dimensions of the infographic and the colors used for the design.

For example, is your audience mostly on Instagram? Then your infographic should probably be square. Does your audience do a lot of Pinterest scrolling? Then your infographic should be Pinterest ready.

Is your audience highly academic or more visually inclined? Are they into data visualizations or simple and to-the-point information?

If you don’t know the answer to these questions, it’s time to do some research on brand messaging. Look around on the internet for infographics that visualize information for the audience you want to reach.

Find out which infographics get the most engagement and which ones don’t do so well. Don't forget to take a cue from the successful ones.

2. Define the Goal of Your Infographic

What do you want to achieve with your infographic? Is the purpose to educate, entertain or show results of a survey? Or is it something else?

Knowing the goal of your infographic helps you word the copy, pick the right design elements and set the tone for the entire visual.

For example, the infographic above on the planning steps has an educational goal. Its purpose is to teach you to how to plan your infographic design in nine simple steps. Hopefully we did a good job!

3. Choose a Topic for Your Infographic

The next step is to pick a relevant topic for your infographic. What information do you plan to convey with your infographic?

Will you be showcasing the services of your company? Do you want to visualize the information from a blog post? Are you going to print the infographic to put up in the employee lounge?

Defining the topic of an infographic is similar to defining a theme for a story. It gives the whole thing a backbone and something to hold on to.

The infographic below is focused on a single topic: how to increase blog engagement.

Make sure your infographic is focused on a single main point. Don’t pick a topic that’s too broad or vague. The more specific your infographic topic is, the more value and depth it will offer.

4. Collect the Data and Information for Your Infographic

Now that you know what your infographic will be about, it’s time to collect all the data and information you need to write the copy.

If the infographic is accompanying a blog post, you won’t need to conduct a lot of external research other than what's included in the post.

But if the infographic will stand alone, start digging up relevant statistics from credible sources and put together all the textual information and dataset.

5. Fact-Check Everything and Cite Your Sources

Don’t forget to fact-check every bit of information and data that you plan to include. There’s nothing worse than an infographic with erroneous data or claims. It will make you and your company look untrustworthy.

Additionally, keep track of all the URLs you visited to get your information. You’re going to add these to the footer of your infographic, which we will discuss more about later in this article.

6. Decide How to Visualize Your Infographic Data

Once you have all the data and information, figure out how to visualize it.

The first step of data visualization is to separate the textual information from the data. Depending on your data, you can choose from various types of charts, graphs, widgets or even a timeline or flowchart.

Perhaps you need comparison visualizations, like tables or Venn diagrams. Maybe you have geographic data and you need a map diagram.

Take a look inside the Visme editor, which has over 44 types of charts and graphs, for more data visualization options.

7. Set the Tone for Your Infographic

Once you have all the data and information figured out, it’s time to set the tone for the rest of your infographic copy.

What tone of voice do you need in order to achieve your goal and reach the right audience? Is it a friendly tone or an academic one? Do you need to establish a business or corporate style tone or a fun and humorous one?

Once you’ve decided on the tone, you can now start writing the copy.

8. Write the Copy and Create a Textual Outline

Writing copy for an infographic is a little different from writing for an article or report. The trick is to think ahead and consider that the text will be separated into sections.

The copy for an infographic looks more like an outline than a text with paragraphs. Separate each section and word it in a way that’s easy to read fast and still consistent with your tone.

9. Sketch a Wireframe of Your Infographic

Grab a sheet of paper and do a quick sketch of what you want your infographic to look like. Take a look at how many sections you have and how they can be organized.

You can use a flash card for each section so that you know where the textual information goes and where the data goes. You don’t need to be an artist or a creative genius to achieve this!

Creating a wireframe is not about how things will look, it's about how the different elements will be placed within the infographic space.

 

How to Make an Infographic: The Design

After you've gone through the first steps of planning your infographic, it’s time to actually start designing it. Using Visme’s integrated tools to create infographics will give you a great head start.

In this section, we’ll show you two ways to design an infographic:

• How to Make an Infographic with a Template
• How to Make an Infographic with a Blank Canvas and Content Blocks

Read both options in detail to get the most out of this infographic design tutorial.

How to Make an Infographic With Templates

Starting with a template is definitely the easiest way to create an infographic that looks professional and doesn't take ages to make.

When you choose the right infographics template, all you need to do is add your copy and visuals to the already formatted composition.

Even if the design of the template doesn’t fit your content exactly, it’s pretty easy to customize and adjust accordingly.

To help you out, Visme offers thousands of templates and content blocks that are all professionally designed and fully customizable.

But before anything else, you need to figure out what kind of infographic template will fit your wireframe best. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the different types of infographic templates available in Visme.

Ready to design your infographic?

Let’s get started!

1. Choose a Template for Your Infographic

Choosing the right template is the first step in figuring out how to make infographics in minutes that work with your type of data.

To choose the perfect template, select a category and browse through the collection until you find one that will work with your wireframe.

If you aren’t sure about the category of infographic you need, scroll through the template gallery to get an idea of the possibilities.

Consider your data, your copy outline and the wireframe you put together. The perfect template is out there, you just need to find it.

When you find the best possible template, open the viewer and double-check the entire thing. If it’s good, open it in the editor. If it’s not just right, keep scrolling until you find a better one.

For this tutorial on how to make an infographic, we’ll be using the “Five Stages of Commercialization” template.

If you’d like to follow along with the steps, just sign in to your Visme dashboard and click on the template below. If you don’t have a Visme account, you can sign up for free here.

2. Insert Your Content into the Template Placeholders

Now that you have the template in front of you, it’s time to insert your own content. Before you start, take a good look at the template and the sections in it, and compare it with your textual outline.

If your outline has more sections, you can easily add them to the template. And if your outline is shorter, simply take a few sections out of there.

Pro Tip: To add another block, hover on the top left corner of the section and click on the plus (+) sign. Then choose “add from template” and you will enter the content library where you can pick any style of block you want.

Start inserting your text and go section by section until you’ve used all your content. In some cases, you might need to shorten the text to make it fit better. You can even try changing the font to see if that helps.

Here are some recommended font sizes for infographics:

• Large Headers: 24-36 pt.
• Medium Headers: 20-24 pt.
• Text Content: 14-18 pt.

Don’t forget to keep the title at the top of your infographic. Make it look important by using a strong font style that grabs attention and centering it.

In this template, there is a large headline area at the top where you can insert your title and subtitle with just a few clicks:

3. Choose the Font Pairing for Your Text Content

There are two reasons why font pairing is important for your infographic:

• It affects the way your infographic looks
• It helps adjust the sizing of the text blocks

We recommend using a maximum of two font styles in your infographic—one for the heading and another for text blocks.

Visme offers hundreds of premium fonts in various styles to help you create the perfect look for your infographic.

You can either use two styles of the same font or two completely different fonts. Just make sure the font or fonts you choose match the tone and message of your infographic content.

For example, you can use a large bold or all-caps styling for the header and normal weight for the body text. This type of font pairing works best when you're dealing with a versatile font like Arvo, Lato or Open Sans.

Check out this helpful video by Visme that will walk you through the entire process of selecting the right fonts for your designs:

The choice of fonts and styling can also help with the general size of the text blocks. Some fonts look bigger than others even at the same point size.

If you change the point size of the font as you use it, make sure to maintain balance. For example, all primary headings should have the same size. This applies to other similar text blocks, such as body content, too.

4. Select and Place Icons in Your Infographic

No one likes an infographic that’s only made up of text.

Here's how to make infographics that don't look like walls of text. Use icons that help visualize some of the text content and draw attention to each section.

The Visme editor has a huge selection of vector icons organized into different categories. You can browse through until you find the ones you need or use the search bar to type in your keyword.

Don’t forget to be consistent when it comes to choosing icons for your infographic—all of them need to be of the same style.

If you like them colored, then they should all be colored. Similarly, if you prefer to use line icons, then all of them should have the same line style.

Icons should also match the typography you chose. If your font is thick and rounded, choose icons that have a similar style. If the font is thin and dainty, then all your icons should look like that too.

You can also take advantage of animated icons and illustrations to create an animated infographic that stands out from the page.

5. Use Data Widgets to Visualize Statistics in Your Infographic

If your content includes numerical or informational data, you can visualize it with one of the many data widgets available in the Visme editor.

Choose a graph from the graph engine, a radial counter, a progress bar, a table or an array. If you aren’t sure what kind of data visualization to use, this article on the types of graphs will help you choose the right one.

6. Analyze Flow and Define the Sections in Your Infographic

Once you have the content inside the infographic, all set with data widgets and icons, start analyzing the flow and balance of the entire visual.

It’s important that the flow of information moves seamlessly from beginning to end. A well-balanced visual with clearly defined sections will make viewers connect with your infographic and the content inside it.

The information on your infographic should follow the basic rules of hierarchy. A good rule of thumb is to follow a Z or F viewing path.

Begin with the top left corner and continue to downwards and to the left, either in a Z or an F pattern. You can do this with various elements, such as colors, sizes, icons, numbers or even arrows.

6. Customize the Color Theme of Your Infographic

This is the last step to finalizing your infographic. You can keep the original color of the template or choose from Visme's preset color themes.

If none of the available color themes work, you can also adjust the color of each element in your infographic separately using the color picker.

 

How to Make an Infographic With a Blank Canvas and Content Blocks

Templates aren’t the only way to create great-looking infographics. You can also start with a blank canvas and put a totally unique visual together.

For this tutorial, the planning steps from the first section of this article are particularly important, especially the last two steps about creating the wireframe and sketch of how you want your infographic to look like.

Not using a template will make your infographic special and one of a kind. Creating one from scratch doesn’t need to be difficult either!

Visme offers tons of pre-designed content blocks to help you put together stunning infographics in minutes without using a template.

Let's dig into the details of how you can use and customize them to create an infographic completely from scratch without the help of a template.

1. Select the Blank Infographic Canvas in the Main Dashboard

Open your Visme dashboard and choose the infographics tab. Once inside, click on the blank canvas option that's right before all the templates.

The blank infographic canvas opens up in a default size, which you can adjust with the draggable length bar or by adding content blocks.

At first, you will only see one empty block. Hover on it, click on the plus (+) sign and choose “Add from template.”

2. Add Content Blocks to Your Infographic

Visme’s content block library is organized by categories, similar to the infographic templates. Here’s a quick list so you can get an idea:

• Headline
• Icons and Text
• Images and Text
• Statistics / Figures
• Charts and Graphs
• Comparison
• Diagrams
• Timelines
• Process
• Maps
• Footer

With your wireframe and textual outline in hand, start choosing content blocks and adding them to your canvas as you see fit.

You can always delete a content block later if you don’t want to use it. Just get rid of it by clicking on the trash can icon on the popup menu.

Create custom content blocks

If you can’t find the exact content block you need in the content block library, you can also make your own by mixing and matching elements.

Go back to your blank canvas and click on Basics on the left. Navigate over to "Suggested Content" to see bits and pieces of complete content blocks.

You can put these together however you like—mix and match the elements to create your own personalized sections.

3. Insert the Text Content Into Your Infographic

Now that you have a visual draft of your infographic, it’s time to insert all your information. Work through your textual outline and wireframe and always double-check along the way so you don’t forget anything.

Adjust your content to fit the blocks or make the blocks adjust to your content. Every block has a draggable bar to easily adjust the length.

Every element inside the content blocks is also customizable—just drag the corner handles and adjust as needed.

4. Customize the Data Widgets in Your Infographic

It’s time to customize the data widgets in the sections that have them. Work on the widgets from top to bottom, following your outline.

If the existing widgets in the content blocks don’t make the cut, Visme’s graph engine offers plenty of other options to choose from.

You can also find lots of other types of data widgets under the Data tab on the dashboard menu. Additionally, you can also try out the flowchart builder and map engine for other types of data. The options are endless!

5. Insert Icons and Graphics into Your Infographic

After you’ve inserted your content and customized the data widgets, add icons in the sections that still need some visualization.

Some textual content could even be entirely replaced by icons, like numbers on a list or as visual support. Icons can also help with the flow of information and balance of the content blocks.

6. Balance Out the Typography in Your Infographic

Don’t use more than two fonts in your infographic; a larger one for headings and a regular-sized one for informational and body content.

Choose a font that visually matches the tone and purpose of your infographic. For example, a business infographic would look good with clean, corporate-style fonts like Verdana or Helvetica.

To achieve a good balance, pair the fonts using either two styles of the same font or two completely different fonts. To find out more about selecting fonts that work well together, check out our font pairing guide here.

7. Adjust the Color Theme of Your Infographic

The last thing to do with your infographic is to adjust the color theme. Click on the color theme tab on the left side of the Visme dashboard.

There are around ten default color themes available. Click on one of them to see how they change every single content block in the infographic.

Alternatively, you can also change the color of any element individually using the color picker, or upload your own brand palette.

8. Check the Flow of Your Entire Infographic

The last step to finish your infographic is to check if the flow makes sense.

Is the information easy to read and understand? Does the content draw the attention of your viewers in the right order?

Adjust any text or icons that might not be doing their job properly and polish off the rest of your infographic.

9. Add Sources and Company Information in the Footer

Remember how we advised you to save all the URLs you used to dig up information for your infographic during the planning phase?

You should add all the sources you used to the footer. Not only is this good moral practice of giving credit where credit is due, it can also save you from getting into legal trouble.

If you used your own blog post for the information, include that link on its own. There are special footer content blocks in the content block library to help you out.

Pro-tip: Don’t forget to add your website and logo at the end of your infographic. It helps with creating brand awareness, especially if you plan to share your graphic on social media.

10. Proofread and Spell-Check Everything

Your infographic is almost ready!

Before downloading it, take another look at all the copy to see if you missed any typos or grammatical errors.

If it’s easier, ask a coworker to have a look at it as a fresh pair of eyes. If you’re using images, make sure they’re relevant and look good. Also, double-check the icons to see if they are the best option.

Once the proofreading is done, you can use tools like Respona to connect with relevant bloggers and journalists in your space to promote your infographic.

 

How to Make a Premium Infographic with a Visme Business Account

Making an infographic with Visme is completely free, but if you want access to some premium features, consider getting a subscription.

Here are a few perks of getting a Visme Business Account that will make creating an infographic easier for your brand:

Premium Templates

With a Visme Complete subscription or Team account, you get access to lots of premium templates. These are professionally designed, and in many cases, based on the same infographics we create for our own blog posts.

The Brand Kit

The Visme Brand Kit gives you the power of a style guide, where you can store your brand fonts, logos and graphics for later use. Additionally, you can turn any custom infographic of your own into a template. You can also save your own content blocks in the content library to use later.

Interactivity

With a Visme Business Account, you can add interactive elements to your infographics and download them for offline use in the HTML5 format. This makes sure that you can show off your interactive infographic even when you aren’t connected to the internet.

 

How to Make Infographics That Shine

Making an infographic used to be a difficult task, but it just isn’t anymore.

Hiring a designer to make your infographics can tip your small business budget in the wrong direction in no time.

You might be surprised, but both designers and non-designers are now using Visme to create infographics for various purposes. Check out some of our customer case studies to see how people are using our platform.

Sign up with Visme for free to start making your own infographic today!

Did you learn how to make infographics that stand out? We'd love to know! And if you have any questions or suggestions, let us know in the comments below.