Thing 21: Creating Infographics
I love Infographics. To me they are a type of art-form and as such they require a lot of skill to make a good one. I have 'Information is Beautiful' by David McCandless on my bookshelf. It's a gorgeous book full of interesting images displaying some very mundane information. Whoever thought a chart on sandwich fillings could be so beautiful?
I think they are a very effective way of communicating statistics in a visually appealing manner and in terms of advocacy I think they would be a very useful tool for libraries. I think we really should use them a lot more. Even as a quick tweet or Instagram image of the monthly or annual statistics for the library. 'here's how we did this month...' Maynooth University Library do it, and they put the info graph on all their computers as wallpaper. Brilliant and inspiring!
Here is my attempt at an infograph, using some of the stats from the Rudai 23 Blog. It took hours! Far longer than I like to spend on something. I do a lot of promotional posters in work, and I can manage the basics and throw together something pretty quickly. Infographs I find a bit mind boggling though. I end up getting bogged down in detail: "how would this look on the left? No on the right? Is that center? Dont like that font? Oh if that was just a smidgen more orange - ah I've ruined all now! Start over..."
If I was doing this for work I think it would be too time consuming, taking into account all the other responsibilities we have and the lack of staff at the moment. It's a pity because I would love to use this tool more.
I used Ease.ly to create it - not so easily. I found the site a little fiddly to get used to. I use canva a lot and I like it. It keeps any images or logos you might have uploaded for use later, which easely doesn't do. Easely has better templates for infographs though and one feature it has that Canva doesnt is that you can group objects together and move them around as one. This is really important to me.
I tried a quick infograph for work a few months ago using the stats from our summer reading challenge. I made a twitter banner and facebook banner with it and I think it looked good. But that took hours and meant that someone else was under pressure while I put it together. I would like to do this more often. It's important to be able to show off after putting so much work into a big programme like the summer reading challenge. It's really important that other people know about the impact of our work as well and an Infograph is the perfect way to show that. You can see it here.
easel.ly
I think they are a very effective way of communicating statistics in a visually appealing manner and in terms of advocacy I think they would be a very useful tool for libraries. I think we really should use them a lot more. Even as a quick tweet or Instagram image of the monthly or annual statistics for the library. 'here's how we did this month...' Maynooth University Library do it, and they put the info graph on all their computers as wallpaper. Brilliant and inspiring!
Here is my attempt at an infograph, using some of the stats from the Rudai 23 Blog. It took hours! Far longer than I like to spend on something. I do a lot of promotional posters in work, and I can manage the basics and throw together something pretty quickly. Infographs I find a bit mind boggling though. I end up getting bogged down in detail: "how would this look on the left? No on the right? Is that center? Dont like that font? Oh if that was just a smidgen more orange - ah I've ruined all now! Start over..."
If I was doing this for work I think it would be too time consuming, taking into account all the other responsibilities we have and the lack of staff at the moment. It's a pity because I would love to use this tool more.
I used Ease.ly to create it - not so easily. I found the site a little fiddly to get used to. I use canva a lot and I like it. It keeps any images or logos you might have uploaded for use later, which easely doesn't do. Easely has better templates for infographs though and one feature it has that Canva doesnt is that you can group objects together and move them around as one. This is really important to me.
I tried a quick infograph for work a few months ago using the stats from our summer reading challenge. I made a twitter banner and facebook banner with it and I think it looked good. But that took hours and meant that someone else was under pressure while I put it together. I would like to do this more often. It's important to be able to show off after putting so much work into a big programme like the summer reading challenge. It's really important that other people know about the impact of our work as well and an Infograph is the perfect way to show that. You can see it here.
easel.ly
Great Infographic Niamh!
ReplyDeleteThanks Mary
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