From the perspective of someone who isn’t a designer, creating an infographic that’s both beautiful and effective can seem like an impossible task…but that’s far from the truth. Follow our beginner-friendly infographic design guide below to learn how to make your own.
How to Make an Infographic:
Let’s dive into each step in more detail.
Outline your goals for creating your infographic
An infographic is a visual communication aid that you can use to:
Provide a quick overview of a topic
Whether you’re presenting a new concept that is difficult to understand, outlining the steps in a project plan, or introducing a new policy, summarizing the information with an infographic can clear up confusion. Your colleagues will be forever grateful:
Explain and simplify a complex process
New processes can cause a lot of confusion. If it’s a complex process that might be hard for people to wrap their heads around, try creating a process infographic that your audience or clients can use as a reference:
Process infographics can be helpful for demystifying abstract processes like a customer journey:
Display research findings or survey data
Infographics are the perfect way to share survey data because they allow you to tell a story with your data. This comes in particularly handy if you’re sharing your survey data on social media, in a blog post, or an a white paper. Infographics create the potential to get a lot of eyes on your survey data. Take this content marketing statistics infographic, for example:
Summarize a long blog post or report
When you have a long blog post or report, it can be helpful to summarize key points in an infographic. This makes it easy for readers to scan for the most important information.
Instead of having to answer the same questions after sending out a report, or having people miss out on important details–a summarized visual report helps to eliminate these issues:
Compare and contrast multiple options
When presented with two good options, how do you make a decision? Write down the pros and cons of each. A comparison infographic is a visual way to compare product, plans, arguments, and ideas:
Raise awareness about an issue or cause
Using your social channels to build awareness is important for many organizations. Infographics have the power to help you tell a story with data–to put a face to numbers.
Before you begin to think about layout design, charts, or aesthetics, you need to think hard about the goals of your infographic. Why are you making this infographic?
When I say goals, I don’t mean high-level goals like “summarize complex information” or “improve website traffic”.
I mean clear, concrete, achievable communication goals.
Define the burning problem
Recognize that you’re creating this infographic so that your audience can gain something very specific from reading it. That very specific thing should be a burning problem that your audience has in their lives, and that your infographic is going to solve.
Use a question pyramid
From there, use a question pyramid to take that burning problem and turn it into 3-5 actionable questions to tackle in your infographic: 
These questions will become the framework around which you’ll build your infographic, and will help you tell a compelling story.
The supporting questions should reveal the basic information your audience will need to know to understand the main topic, and the probing questions that will reveal broader insights which should ultimately solve the burning problem.
Let’s work through an example. This infographic outlines the steps in the product design process:
The burning problem they’re trying to solve is “what steps are in the product design process?” Their question pyramid might look something like this:
Defining the burning problem and using the question pyramid to break it down into actionable questions is the first step to making an effective infographic.
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