Nine facts, nine icons, four colours and a heading that says “Did you know?”. That’s the typical business infographic, and almost nobody reads past the third fact. The icons don’t explain anything the words didn’t already say.
An infographic earns its place when a picture explains something faster or more clearly than a sentence could. That’s a narrower job than most people give it, and that’s a good thing.
Decide whether you need one at all
Before designing anything, ask what the reader should understand after looking at it for five seconds. Write that as one sentence. If you can’t, you don’t have an infographic yet. You have a fact sheet.
Then ask whether a visual makes that sentence clearer. Some things genuinely benefit:
- A process or sequence. “What happens after you book” in four steps. A simple numbered flow is easier to follow than a paragraph.
- A comparison. Two or three options side by side, like plan A versus plan B.
- Change over time. Something went up or down, and the size of the change matters.
- Proportion or scale. “One in five” is easier to feel when you see five figures with one highlighted.
- Location. Where your service areas are, where a project is happening.
Some things don’t benefit at all. A list of your services with an icon next to each is a list with decoration. A single statistic is usually stronger as a big number with one line of context than as a chart.
One point per graphic
The biggest improvement you can make to almost any infographic is to cut it into pieces. Each piece makes one point, with one visual.
Take a made-up example. A local solar installer wants an infographic for their website and socials. The first draft has:
- Number of installs this year
- Average system size
- A map of towns they cover
- Three steps of the install process
- A comparison of panel brands
- Customer star rating
- Years in business
That’s seven separate stories crammed into one tall image. On a phone, each fact ends up tiny. Split it, and you get several useful graphics instead:
- “How an install works”: a four-step flow, used on the service page and as a carousel post.
- “Where we work”: a simple map of the towns covered, used on the contact page.
- “Which panel suits you”: a three-column comparison, used on a blog post and in quotes.
The install count, star rating and years in business don’t need a graphic at all. They work better as plain text near the enquiry button.
Keep the visual simple
Once you know the single point, design for it and strip everything else back.
- Use the simplest form that shows the point. Bars for comparing amounts. A line for change over time. Numbered blocks for steps. Avoid 3D, avoid pie charts with lots of slices, and avoid circular layouts unless the process really loops.
- One accent colour for what matters. Put the important bar, step or number in your brand accent and everything else in a neutral. If everything is highlighted, nothing is.
- Label directly. Put the label next to the thing, not in a legend the reader has to look up.
- Use icons only when they help recognition. A phone icon next to “Call us” helps. A lightbulb next to “Ideas” doesn’t.
- Write the headline as the finding. “Most installs take one day” tells people the point. “Installation timeline” makes them work it out.
The same thinking applies to charts in longer documents, which we cover in designing annual reports people actually read.
Make it readable on a phone
Most people will see your infographic on a phone, often in a social feed, often while doing something else. Design for that first.
Pick the right shape. Tall, narrow infographics were designed for Pinterest-style scrolling. In a social feed they get cropped or shrunk. Square or 4:5 portrait images, or a carousel of several, usually display better. For a website, consider building the graphic in HTML rather than as an image, so text reflows on small screens and stays readable by search engines and screen readers.
Check the text size at phone size. Shrink your design to the width of a phone screen and look at it at arm’s length. If you have to pinch to read the labels, the text is too small or there’s too much of it.
Break long ones into a carousel. A four-step process works well as four slides, one step each, with large type. Carousels also sit better in social media feeds than one tall image.
Don’t put the only copy of important information in an image. If the graphic contains a price, a phone number or a key fact, repeat it in the caption or the page text. Images can’t be searched, copied or reliably read by assistive technology. Add alt text that states the point of the graphic, not just “infographic”.
Tools
For simple graphics, a template in a tool like Canva can work fine, and we cover its limits in Canva for business. For anything with real data, or anything you’ll use across your website, print and socials, it’s worth getting a designer to build it once properly, with an editable version you can update next year.
Your next infographic
Write the one-sentence point. Choose the form that shows it. Cut everything that doesn’t serve it. Then check it on your phone before it goes anywhere.
If you’ve got information that needs explaining clearly, our graphic design team can turn it into something people will read. You can see the kind of work we do in our portfolio.