Design your way

Monday, July 1, 2013

How often do you read a 1000 or 2000 word article with complete attention and without skipping anything? If you’re not the writer yourself, chances are that you do not spend more than a few minutes on such articles and merely skim through them at a pretty rapid pace.

But have you noticed how you give so much more time to visual stats and pictorial data representations? They say pictures are worth a thousand words, and the way infographics are taking over, you can’t argue with that.

But what does that mean for you as a business? Simple….. You need to churn out more visuals and infographics to promote your content and capture your audience that is already in a hurry and doesn’t have time to read your 2000 word articles. You can’t rely solely on written content anymore. The visuals have to be incorporated.

Luckily for you, there are some awesome tools available online just for this purpose!

EWC Presenter

HTML 5 Presenter by Easy WebContent is one of the most complete and user friendly online tools to create highly attractive and professional infographics within no time. This web based tool allows you to choose from different pre designed themes that you can use to create your own infographics by using simple drag & drop options.

Data representation methods such as graphs, charts and visuals are pre-embedded in the themes and only require the users to enter values. The interface is very user friendly and on-the-go tips literally walk you through the whole process of creating your infographics.

EWC Presenter can be used to create beautiful multimedia to be embedded on your website, infographics for your viral campaigns as well as multimedia content for other purposes.

Vizualize.Me

Create stunning visual resumes using highly professional and eye catching themes on Visualize.Me. You can simply integrate your LinkedIn profile with this website and let it extract all your professional data and present it in a format that will make you fall in love with your resume.

Piktochart

Piktochart is another web based tool that offers an easy to use drag & drop interface and a few attractive themes that can be used to create highly engaging infographics. The tool allows you to insert images and charts and gives you the option to import data from CSV files. Once you’re done with the infographic, you can to export it in either PNG or JPG image formats.

Easel.Ly

This is a very effective tool for storytelling. It offers an attractive user interface and some beautiful themes that allow you to kick off your infographics using simple drag & drop options

What About Me?

This is an awesome tool by Intel that gives visual form to your digital life by integrating all your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube. The tool allows you to create infographics of your digital life habits, likes & dislikes and general activity within a few minutes and can even surprise you with the picture it extracts.

Visual.ly

This free tool allows you to create infographics using your Twitter & Facebook profiles and compare different Twitter accounts with each other.

Infogr.Am

Another free web based tool, still in its beta version, that gives you lots of attractive drag & drop visual options to create engaging infographics that can be further customized by adding images and charts.

Many Eyes

‘Finding the right way to view your data is as much an art as a science’ is the motto behind this experiment by the IBM Cognos and IBM Research. It offers a variety of single click visualization options to create data driven infographics.

Photo Stats

Photo Stats is an infographic app for iPhone that monitors your photography habits and patterns, and presents them as eye catching visuals. The app gives you infographics of your photography habits that you can share with your friends social circles as well.

iCharts

Very useful tool that can help you create simplified charts out of complex data within minutes using simple visualization options.

StatSilk

Data analysis has never been more enjoyable than this web based and desktop software that makes it very easy to create mappings and different interactive visualizations.

InFoto Free

InFoto Free tracks all your photography habits and presents them in high quality infographics. It’s an Android app that tracks things like your favorite times to take photos, the places you capture the most with your camera and other interesting stats.

ChartsBin

A very simple but useful online tool that can create interactive maps for you that can be embedded easily in your blog or website.

Wordle

Wordle generates word clouds for any text that you provide. It also gives you some basic text styling options such as color and font to further modify the prominent parts of your content.

Tableau

Tableau is a Windows only software that creates heat maps, flow charts, Venn diagrams, bar charts and other forms of visualizations from numerical data. This is not an online tool and needs to be downloaded before it can be used.

Conclusion

Having the right tools could simply your work and make you more efficient. For example, instead of having to build pages upon pages of your website from scratch, you can use the WordPress CMS. Instead of having to learn HTML to build your website, you can use simple tools like IMcreator or Easy WebContent and instead of having to create every infographic via Photoshop, you can use any of the 20 tools featured above.

What do you think about the above tools? Do you have any other tool you’d like to add to the list? Let us know in the comments!