Content Matters

As a content strategist, I’m always looking for ways to incorporate compelling graphics with text to tell a story. In many cases, an effective infographic works well to communicate a story, or aspects of a story, better than text alone can. Trouble is, I have the artistic ability of a doorknob. (It’s a great sadness of mine, along with my lack of musical ability.) So I turn to online tools to help me out. Today, I’m going to share my 10 favorite free online resources for creating your own infographics—no (or little) artistic wizardry required.

For Those Who Know Their Way Around Photoshop

If you’re a Photoshop wiz and just need a little instruction on creating infographics from scratch, I highly recommend Lynda.com’s infographics courses on planning and wireframing, area bubbles, and visualizing relationships.

I’ve divided these resources into two groups: tools for creating comprehensive infographics (infographics that incorporate multiple elements such as text, backgrounds, color schemes, charts, pictures, etc.) and tools for creating standalone visualizations (such as charts, tables, diagrams, or word clouds). Use both types of tools together to create stellar infographics of your own.

Comprehensive Infographic Tools

vizualize.me. A fun way to get started with infographic creation is to see yourself as an infographic—or rather, to see the information from your LinkedIn profile as an infographic. visualize.me does much of the work for you by importing your LinkedIn profile. You select what parts of your LinkedIn profile to include or exclude, and then customize the theme and style (fonts and colors) of your infographic. Share your visualized LinkedIn profile on social networks (including LinkedIn itself) with a link back to your visualize.me page.

visualize.me is in beta, and I’ve noticed a few bugs. For instance, my college education and older work experience wouldn’t display in some themes. And I had to redo font changes several times, although I’d saved the changes. But these kinks should be worked out as visualize.me matures.

vizualize.me infographic

visual.ly. You can create a quick infographic on visual.ly so long as it involves Facebook or Twitter. You select a “story,” such as a Twitter showdown or the life of a hashtag, and enter a few bits of information. visual.ly does the rest. In the future, visual.ly promises to provide more customizable infographics “in popular categories like sports, politics, and food.” But for now, it’s a great way to create quick infographics for popular hashtags or Facebook stats.

Need some infographic inspiration? Browse the visual.ly gallery of professionally created infographics (approaching 17,000 at the time of this post). Filter by category, view by layout type, or organize by characteristics like trending, most liked, newest, most commented, or most viewed. Warning: Perusing some of the best infographics on the Web can be a real time sink.

infogr.am. Log in to infogr.am with your Facebook or Twitter account to create an infographic based on one of five templates. You can then customize your creation by modifying the color scheme and adding charts (bar, pie, matrix, or line), your own pictures, titles, text, and quotes.

Piktochart. The free version of Piktochart offers five infographic themes from which to choose. (More available in the paid version.) Modify the base template by changing the color scheme and lorem ipsum text, and by adding or removing shapes, graphics, text, and special “theme graphics” unique to your chosen theme. Save your infographic to the Piktochart site, or download it as an image.

easel.ly. easel.ly is another theme-based Web app for creating infographics or data visualizations. You start by simply dragging any “vheme” (visual theme) onto your “canvas.” Customize by dragging and dropping objects, background colors, shapes, and text. You can also upload your own images.  Save your masterpiece to the easel.ly site, then share by linking, embedding, or downloading to your computer.

easel.ly infographic

Standalone Data Visualization Tools

Knoema. Need charts, maps, or tables on a broad range of topics? Knoema offers such graphic content based on 656 datasets, 19,050,000 time series, and 278,000,000 data points (and growing daily). You can select an existing visualization “gadget” to embed on your site, or export in Microsoft Excel, comma separated value, Microsoft PowerPoint, or Adobe Acrobat format. Better still, you can upload your own data to create mashups with existing data sets.

Knoema chart

Many Eyes. An experiment from IBM Research and the IBM Cognos software group, Many Eyes is a robust tool for creating visualizations using your own or others’ data. Registered users can upload their own data to create visualizations, rate data sets and visualizations, create and participate in topic centers, and select items to watch. Non-registered users can view, discuss, and create new visualizations from existing data sets. More than 20 visualization types are available, including charts, graphs, word trees and clouds, and maps. Share visualizations via Facebook or Twitter, or embed a static or live visualization on your site.

Wordle. Wordle offers a quick way to create “word clouds” from text you provide via cut and paste, blog URL, or del.icio.us user name. Customize the resulting word cloud with your choice of fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Wordle word cloud

create.ly. create.ly is an online diagramming and collaboration tool. Its user-friendly interface offers drag-and-drop creation of professional-looking flowcharts, web mockups, interactive site maps, mind maps, Venn diagrams, network plans, chemistry labs, and other visualizations. Share with team members, or export as an image, PDF, or email attachment.

Hohli. When a quick basic chart is what you need, Hohli fits the bill. Simply select the chart type and size, then add your data and customize for look and feel.

SOUND OFF: What tools do you use to create infographics?