What’s an Infographic and How Do I Get One?

Thanks to Credo Reference for the below information.  I found it fascinating.  Hopefully, you will also.

 By: Deirdre Costello, Content Associate
“Infographic” is short for information graphic, a visual representation of information that’s both easier to absorb and generally more appealing than a list or a spreadsheet. For obvious reasons, infographics have become a popular way to share information about everything from brightly colored pop culture timelines to interactive models of government data.
Last week I shared one of my favorite infographics, Hack College’s Get More Out of Google, which I think is a great example of how to make information easy on the eyes. Credo has put together a Pinterest board of infographics that might be of interest to librarians, academics and readers, and there are a ton of other collections out there; GE has a really neat collection of interactive data visualizations, the Game of Thrones list is a personal favorite reference (I can’t keep the houses straight, even after reading the books), and then of course there are the familiar and everyday infographics like subway maps and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
Infographics are great tools for presentations (those text-heavy Power Points can get pretty stale), flyers, posters, or really any situation where you want a lot of information to have a specific and powerful impact – here’s a list of tools I’ve played around with and found pretty easy to use so you can start making them for yourself! Everything on this list is free, or at least has a free version.

• GOOD Labs has a great tool for creating simple, bright pie charts or Venn diagrams; great for presentations, and the examples are good for a chuckle.
• Piktochart, which has both a free and a paid version, provides easily customizable templates that make your information pop. If you’ve checked out infographics before, many of these will look VERY familar!
• Infogr.am offers more familiar templates, with options to create either an infographic or a chart as well as the ability to create an archive of them. Very, very easy to use, share and embed. Check out an infographic I made on comic book movies!
• Google charts offer a wealth of options, but may require a little more know-how to manipulate into something that looks as polished as many infographics out there.
• Wordle is a tool for creating “word clouds,” where the words repeated most often ( minus articles, of course) appear the largest. You often see these on blogs, and they can be a neat tool for textual analysis. Can be a little hard to use on your own website.
• Prezi is not exactly a tool for creating infographics, but while we’re on the topic of stale, texty presentations, Prezi is a great alternative tool for creating dynamic, aesthetically pleasing presentations.

Hopefully you found something interesting in the collections above or a tool that will help you get your points across! If you create any infographics you think we’d find interesting, funny, or just plain stellar, please share them with us!