10 Deadly Mistakes that Will Kill Your Infographics

Over the last few years, creating infographics has become one of the best ways of presenting complex ideas and data sets in an attractive manner.

Not only do infographics get shared much more frequently as compared to simple text articles, but also attract a lot of traffic and backlinks from other users.

However, not all infographics enjoy the same level of attention. In fact there are certain mistakes that might completely kill your infographics and never allow them to go viral.

Avoiding these mistakes is critical, and that is why we have listed them down for you in detail.

1. Selecting the Wrong Tool

This is perhaps the most critical, yet common, mistake that designers make while creating infographics. Choosing the right tool, that allows you to express your ideas exactly how you want, is the first step in creating a highly engaging, and potentially viral, infographic.

If you get this step wrong, your infographic might never actually take off.

Thankfully, there are free online infographic designing apps like EWC Presenter that can easily solve this problem for you. We recommend EWC Presenter specifically because of the huge variety of options and designing flexibility that it offers to its users.

Like WordPress is to blogging and IM Creator is to building websites, Presenter is also one of the popular tools for creating infographics.

Not only can you create highly attractive and engaging infographics by choosing from a wide range of design templates, but also represent your data using beautiful graphs, charts and drag & drop objects.

2. Using Too Much Text Content

The basic idea behind infographics is to present maximum information, which is relevant to the users, in the least possible time. However, many infographic designers simply fail to realize that and use much more text than required.

Make sure you get the balance between graphics and text content right. Ideally, around 70% of your infographic should contain images and graphics. Text should only be used to describe the images and add any other relevant facts.

3. Not Citing Data Sources

Infographics are primarily data driven and include facts & figures from a number of sources. Failure to cite the exact sources for this data is one of the biggest mistakes that can devoid an infographic of any credibility.

You can design your infographic as attractively as you want, but if your data fails to gain the trust of your audience, then hardly anyone would share it with in their social circles.

The best way to counter this mistake is either by mentioning the data sources at the end of the infographic in a separate section or by making it a part of the infographic design. Whichever way you go about it, it is absolutely necessary that you cite your data sources.

4. Being Too Lengthy

It’s true that a carefully designed infographic is much easier to understand than a detailed article on the same subject, but length is still a crucial factor in creating an engaging infographic.

A major advantage of infographics is that they are easy to remember and recall. But if your infographic is too long, you might risk losing the attention of your audience half way through it.

A good way to avoid this mistake is to limit the focus of your infographic. Don’t try to address a dozen issues in a single infographic . Take one issue at a time and dive deep into it.

This will make your infographic much more valuable and easy to remember.

Ideally, you should look to limit your infographics to 8000 pixels and 1.5 MB in file size, to avoid the risk of losing visitors to lengthy load times.

5. Using Low Quality Graphics

Graphics and images are the backbone of any infographic. A weak backbone might easily bring down the rest of the body as well.

So make sure that the graphics and images you select for your infographic are absolutely top notch and relevant to your target market.

6. Focusing on Back Links Only

Just like written content, infographics made for the sole purpose of attracting backlinks usually go nowhere.

Focus on creating infographics that provide value and highlight unique issues in ways that haven’t been done before.

Back links and social media sharing are results of creating high value infographics. You can’t achieve them without giving something valuable first.

(Although you can supercharge the community, so to speak, by doing some active work; as explained on Moz.com a while ago.)

7. Writing Poor Text Content

Although infographics are all about eye-catching images, attractive graphics and unique representation of objects, but quality content still has its place.

Your infographic might offer some of the most valuable information in a beautifully designed template, but if the quality of your written content is poor, you might turn away quality visitors and actually discourage them from sharing your infographics with their online circles.

And just like text articles, infographics with poor written content usually find it hard to establish credibility in the eyes of the users as well.

So make sure you avoid this error at all costs.

8. An Over Complex Design

Infographic design demands creativity and uniqueness. However, an overly complex design or a poor combination of colors and fonts usually backfires and fails to engage the target audience.

Make sure you study your target audience in detail before creating the design and selecting the colors for your infographic. A certain set of colors that attracts a particular audience might completely turn off another group of visitors.

Therefore it is critical to avoid this mistake.

Your selection of fonts should also be consistent. Ideally, go with a single or at most two fonts in your infographic. Also keep the formatting of headings and sub headings consistent with the design.

These are small errors that, if not addressed properly, combine to reduce the effectiveness of your infographics.

9. Not Having a Marketing Plan

You might have the most valuable, attractive and beautifully designed infographic in your niche, but nobody would know about it unless you aggressively market it.

Failure to market infographics effectively is one of the biggest reasons why many valuable infographics never make it big and never become popular.

Make sure you submit your infographic to all the major infographic blogs and submission directories. Also share them on relevant discussion forums and promote them through guest blogging.

10. No Mobile Compatibility

Just in case you haven’t realized yet, we have well & truly entered the mobile era and any website or online resource incompatible with mobile devices is losing out on huge traffic.

Make sure you create responsive infographics that adjust automatically to mobile phones, tablets and different browser dimensions.

Responsive infographics might take a little more effort to create, but their absence will result in higher bounce rates and a loss of, potentially, thousands of visitors.

The post 10 Deadly Mistakes that Will Kill Your Infographics appeared first on Design Inspiration | How to Design a Website.