5 Ingredients For Eye-Catching Infographic Design

We all understand how popular (and important) content marketing is for any business to stay relevant. But rather than constantly churning out blog post after blog post, it’s vital to throw a few new assets in the mix to keep people interested. Visual content is an incredibly easy way to do this.

And we don’t just mean posting pictures on social media or including a photo with your blog post. In order to stand out, you need to create compelling graphics that serve a purpose and have a meaning. The best avenue to do this? Infographics.

As it is with all other content, only the best and most unique work stands out and gets results.

So, how do you create an infographic that performs? Here are a few of the vital ingredients for success.

#1 Tell a Clear Story

The best way to convey information is to use storytelling. Without a story, it’s just a bunch of pictures and bits of information put together.

Unfortunately, that’s what most infographics are. The best ones, however, follow the basic rules for every good story.

There’s an introduction, rising action, a climax, and a resolution. There also needs to be an overarching theme and a narrative.

Follow those rules of storytelling, and you’ll have a much easier time engaging your audience, keeping their attention and convincing them to share your infographic.

#2 Create a Flow

The purpose of an infographic is to convey information visually. That means it needs a story, as mentioned above, but that story needs to flow.

Flow means there are guides to help your audience travel through the infographic. There’s certain ergonomics to how people consume visual content.

There are several ways you can achieve this. You can break your infographic down, use numbers to mark each section, add a timeline or include an intro paragraph that helps your audience travel through the story. Leading them on a natural progression is more likely to keep things clear and maintain their attention.

#3 Show Don’t Tell

Data visualization is the foundation of every good infographic. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is a rule that applies to all visual content.

Effective infographic design uses informative data and never misses an opportunity to turn that data into a stimulating visual.

That doesn’t mean you should turn every single sentence or piece of data into a pie chart. The art of an infographic design lies in the creator’s ability to interpret the data in a more audience-friendly way and choose the elements that should be depicted visually.

#4 Have a Hook and Call to Action

You can and should treat an infographic like a landing page. That means you want to grab the reader’s attention early on and use the engagement you’ve built to lead them to your call to action.

Just as with copywriting, the introduction needs to be the attention-grabber. It’s what gets people to read further and move through the progression of the infographic.

As you follow the flow, you build interest, deliver several ‘Aha!’ moments and provide answers or a solution. If you deliver enough value, your audience will be engaged and ready to take action.

And that’s the right place to put your CTA, such as “Learn More,” “Click Here,” “Do This,” “Sign Up,” “Share” and so on.

#5 Keep It Simple

As the popular quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry goes:  

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

The best infographics convey even the most complex data in a simple way. And that’s the reason they get the most engagement. We all suffer from short attention spans, and if an infographic is overly complicated, we’ll move on to the next one.

To make things simple can be the most difficult thing. To begin with, you want to limit your fonts and color palette and stick with a simple and logical hierarchy. Just as you should stick with one CTA in your emails and on your webpages, your infographic should have a clear focus and message without being cluttered up by conflicting hierarchy.

Naturally, most of us want to consume educational content in the most effortless way. And that’s the key to successful infographic design: the promise of value without much effort.