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This is a guest post by Eric Burgess. A grad student at the UW, Eric is studying for his Masters of Communication in Digital Media. Eric is a Social Media geek and recovering skateboarder, having spent the last few years blogging and building up communities in the action sports industry. When he’s not blogging about being a fashionable dad, he can be found spending time with his family, shopping, and tweeting.
What are Infographics?
From Wikipedia: ‘Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.’ They are a great resource for solving communication problems. Truthfully, the best way to describe their purpose is that they allow us to graphically digest large amounts of data that we’d otherwise have to read and sift through to learn.
Infographics not only help readers quickly digest lots of information in a visual way, they can also serve to help drive traffic to a website. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but even the most basic infographic can drive new visitors to your site. The use of infographics in newsletters, RSS feeds, blogs, white papers and other pages throughout your site won’t only help drive additional traffic but it also helps with brand awareness and organic search rankings.
For a recent client infographic, we really looked hard at the data that was presented to us in this case study. Microsoft’s Windows Azure had helped Lockheed Martin scale their business in a fast, flexible way. Additionally, Lockheed Martin gave their customers cost-effective access to IT resources. We took a very simple theme of “cloud computing” and built the graphic around that. We also used a “word cloud” to call out the benefits of Windows Azure and drew a plane to symbolize Lockheed Martin. In the end it worked out really well and we were pleased with its simplicity.
Since the image file was saved as a .jpeg, we were able to email it to our clients for distribution on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. It’s the perfect medium to have them link back to the original case study which was ultimately our goal.
For more information on infographics, check out Alltop’s infographics section.