Piktochart Infographics » Infograph

How 2 Companies Used Infographics and Rocked!

piktochart — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 06:20:38 +0000

With viral media now a key part of any website’s marketing strategy, infographics have become a key way to lure new visitors with useful information in an attractive format. These graphics have long been used by major companies to point out statistics, research, and other information in major presentations, but they’ve reached new heights as a website marketing and promotional tool. In fact, infographics have become so popular that they even become presidential, serving as one of the Obama-Biden campaign’s chief media tools on major social media networks.

But the proof that infographics have become a driving force in marketing isn’t just anecdotal. For many companies who have embraced this emerging form of promotion, the proof of their effectiveness is actually statistical. And the numbers that back up the importance of embracing infographics are even more impressive than the graphics themselves.

Credits of the image above goes to Shutterstock

Companies Who Use Infographics Experience a Tenfold Increase in Social Media Engagement

Of the many sites embracing infographics for website marketing and viral reach, BitRebels.com may be a shining example of how the strategy can impact the number of visitors and social media shares that a company receives. BitRebels actually put together a study that looked at the impact of a “traditional” post, using primarily text, compared to the impact of using a standard infographic to accomplish the same task. The results are bound to impress website owners.

The company found that its traditional content merited only 62 tweets or retweets on Twitter. While that’s not a low number in some cases, it’s far below what the company had in mind when composing the more traditional post on its website. When that same information was placed into an engaging infogrpahic for easier consumption, the number of tweets increased exponentially — totaling 578 in the same period after the content was posted.

Twitter isn’t the only area where businesses can benefit when they embrace an infographic in place of traditional content. BitRebels experienced a 120 percent increase in the number of +1 votes on the Google+ social network; the post’s shares on LinkedIn increased from 7 to 51; and the number of page views on StumbleUpon increased from 39 to 330 during the same period of time for each block of content.

All told, the company’s traditional post enjoyed 243 “actions” on various social media website, whether that’s Facebook likes, LinkedIn shares, or Twitter retweets. The same information, when presented in an infographic, enjoyed 1,091 “actions” on the same set of social networking websites. That improvement is enough to make a significant difference in sales figures and visitor numbers, and it’s one of the reasons that so many companies are choosing to go with engaging infographics over traditional, blog-style content.

An Interesting Phenomenon: Infographic Traffic Increases Over Time

A company’s first infographic will likely be a huge departure from its usual level of traffic. Its likely that the average number of visitors will increase exponentially, and the infographic will achieve some degree of stardom on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. But more information from BitRebels indicates that infographics are actually a good, future-minded investment for websites that want to see an upward trend in their overall traffic.

The company’s infographics actually got more popular over time. While the first one was a big improvement, subsequent releases of graphical information were even more popular. This accumulation of new visitors can likely be attributed to a spike in social media prominence, overall interest, and the rising profile of the infographic medium over the same period of time. Those businesses that need a dramatic shift in their marketing strategy should take note: An infographic can be a successful, long-term investment in the site’s success.

Another Case Study Proves the Effectiveness of the Infographic Medium

LinchpinSEO, a Chicago-based company always looking for new ways to promote its clients’ websites, recently performed a case study in order to better understand the impact of a typical infographic. The company summed up some information and, just like BitRebels, posted it in both traditional and graphic form during different periods of time. The company’s results largely fell in line with the study done by BitRebels, proving that the presence of an infographic can greatly enhance traffic levels across the board.

The site’s number of page views escalated dramatically over the course of just a single month. The infographic pulled in an additional 632 percent of internet users when compared to the prior month. The average time on the website also increased dramatically, up almost 84 percent over the same period a month prior. Referral traffic increased well over 1,000 percent, while direct traffic was nearly 2,400 percent higher than the prior month’s levels.

Those numbers, in many cases, are what dreams are made of when most websites are crafting an effective marketing plan. Indeed, it’s hard to pull in such traffic without resorting to infographics. Even viral videos haven’t proven as effective as these images, despite their significantly greater investment of time and resources.

A Worthy Investment for Websites Looking for a Change

Best of all, infographics are a sound investment in a website’s immediate strategy and its long-term future. The study done by Chicago’s LinchpinSEO organization found that, due to the increased levels of traffic and revenue, the cost of the average infographic was just 1 cent per visitor. That’s among the most affordable ways to boost a website’s reach — in fact, it’s virtually negligible in terms of the website’s overall marketing budget.

The improvement in the website’s traffic, and the improvement in its overall authority, have also been shown to increase Google search engine rankings for relevant keywords. With higher search rankings, a high return on investment, and access to viral promotion via social media websites, there is simply no better marketing strategy than to embrace infographics. Visitors will find them interesting and engaging — and worthy of sharing to Facebook. Others will use them to discover the website for the first time. And website operators will use them to discover the joy of unparalleled success among new and returning readers.

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7 Things a Design Intern Learned in Piktochart

piktochart — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 06:13:55 +0000

7 Things I Have Learned at Yet Another Studio/ Piktochart in Designing Infographic Themes :

This article has been contributed by our intern while she spent 10 weeks here. Her name is Xiu Xian Koh aka AHean and she has done some awesome creative work with our themes and creative direction as a whole! Thank you, @Ahean!

Focus on one topic.

First thing to consider is to have a single topic for an infographic. Narrow topics have the potential to be very effective because they get to the heart of an issue in a clearly defined way. Out of that definition can emerge a gripping visual representation that sends a clear, unique message without confusing viewers. You can create clearer visualizations if you know where you are going to. After determining your topic, determine a particular question that you want to be answered in your infographics.

Keep it simple.

Simplicity is part of the appeal of an information graphic. Rather than bombarding readers with walls of complex text, the graphic takes an idea and, with the help of clear visuals, makes it easy to understand. In other words, it delivers a quick message that most people should be able to pick up quickly. If you overcomplicate the infographic, you’re undermining one of its best assets. Also, if it is too crowded, it might not attract the viewers but drive them away.

Data is important.

The real reason why you are creating an infographics is to give information about a particular topic or issue. So, in creating it, do not forget that it is the most important thing. Do not overdo the design to the extent that it will dissolve the information. You have to make sure that your design will give clear emphasis to the facts and figures.

Let it tell a story.

An effective infographics can manage to tell a story with the illustrations and graphics. It should be able to say something so that it can relay the information even if they haven’t read the text yet. Well-selected, compelling graphics can bring a message to life in a way that, for many, is more immediate than a block of words. Make sure your design goes beyond looking nice; it should be attractive and message-focused.

Good design is effective.

If we speak of visuals, a good design will always hit the mark. No matter how simple your infographics is, use your creativity to make the design appealing. When we speak of design, colors, typeface, layout and the use of white space matters. People would stare longer to an infographic which has a good design.

Choose appropriate colors.

Colors are vital. Colors can deliver a powerful psychological punch. It is important you choose colors that are attractive and, also important, appropriate to your message. Choose those which can give a great impact to the viewers. Take note of color psychology too. Use the right colors that fit the topic you will create an infographic for. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be colorful. Some infographics use only few colors but are still effective. Find a color balance that is aesthetically appealing while staying true to the tone of your content.

Use short texts.

You are creating a visual presentation so you need to use brief texts that are direct to the point. These could be labels or short messages that can support your visuals. To make the story compelling, it is better to use words in minimum number. You also have to choose the right font type that is readable.

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Developer Milestone Piktochart

piktochart — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 08:06:33 +0000

A Milestone In v0.6.3

Greetings to everyone! I’m Wai Yin, developer at Piktochart.

First off, I’m really proud of what Piktochart’s become. We’ve gone through several minor changes, which when I look back, actually are a whole lot of things combined. I remember the menubar and the list of tools we have on the left pane, they’re so much different now than it was before. In a good way, of course. We wouldn’t have been able to shape Piktochart to what it is today without our team and most importantly, all of you users.

I could go on rambling about the history of Piktochart and its evolution from the alpha-days, but today I shall discuss on two issues we’ve been receiving flak about. First, image quality. We intended the infographic creation process to be fairly quick and the goal be simple; Users pick a theme, edit the “lorem ipsum” placeholder text, move some images around and perhaps add a few images of their own, save the infographic and then share said image on their website or blog. We quickly realize that our users wanted more than just that; they wanted to print it out for presentations and banners.

“Why are the printed images blurry? How do I make it sharper? How do I print this out as a banner?” These were among the many questions thrown our way. Here’s a quick explanation without getting too technical: The full infographic image you see on your computer screen is only about 25% of the print size. This mean if you want the exact image size of the image you see on screen to be printed on paper, it’ll only show up on 25% of your paper. Now if you wanted to print the infographic onto 100% of the paper, the image is forced to zoom in, resulting in the dreaded blurry image.

Can this be fixed? Yes it’s possible. Sadly, we were unable to arrive at a satisfying solution for this issue. This is partly due to a limitation with the flex application itself. It cannot render an image larger than a certain size, and especially when it’s print-size.. It’s something we unfortunately discovered a little later in the development stage of Piktochart.

What are we going to do about it though? We’ve taken note of this “pain” that a lot of our users are experiencing. In the next version of Piktochart, we’re working closely with print-quality images in mind. For one, you will not have to worry about this soon!

The second issue, in direct relation to image printing, was users stumbling with our “HTML” output. Users were supposed to be able to painlessly convert their infographic into a web-embeddable format which they can upload online. As we worked on Piktochart more, we hit a lot of roadblocks and bumpy roads.

One of them was, the fonts won’t load if you open the HTML on your computer; it has to be uploaded online. This makes it really difficult for users to test whether their infographics actually look fine on their blog or website or not. That leads us directly to the next problem: It was difficult to integrate the HTML into any of the user’s existing online content, whether it is ablog or a website.

Users were required to apply adjustments to the HTML output file before they can integrate it to their site. The developers on Piktochart had some difficulty doing it at first, so imagine the trauma a non-computer-savvy user had to face. And even if they managed to integrate it into their website, they would run into another problem, as shown in the screenshot below:

The images were not colored as they were in the Piktochart app. Errors can be seen spilling in the developer’s console. In a nutshell, we can only tamper with the images if the HTML and the images are from the same domain (e.g.www.mywebsite.com). The problem was, the images were on our Piktochart servers. The HTML output file were obviously not, because it was going to be used on users’ websites, blogs, or just on their desktop.

We’ve come up with a possible solution for this. However It’ll take some time to finish and test it. We don’t want to rush a fix for this and have users stumble into another problem. On news that you can look forward to, for the next version of Piktochart, we’ll definitely make sure this issue is completely taken care of.

That’s all for today, I’m afraid. We’ve gone a long way and have thus far reached the most stable version of Piktochart. The two issues discussed above are also thus far, the biggest issues we’re having and the biggest headache we’ve been getting. Let’s hope for the best and may these problems be dealt with as soon as possible. And by then, our users will be able to enjoy Piktochart without worries.

LWY

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How to Easily Create an Infographic (Video)

piktochart — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:03:27 +0000

We made another simple video – annotated on Youtube to demonstrate how we made our own infographic. Total time taken to create a Piktochart – 9 minutes but I cut it short (leaving out the parts when I was just editing the text and drag and dropping the elements).

It’s simple but wanted to prompt everyone to think through the Piktochart before they get started on it.

Enjoy it and let us know what’s the process of creating a Piktochart infographic like for you!

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Make Your Own Infographic

piktochart — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 09:16:41 +0000

You are not a designer? You don’t know what’s a Photoshop or Illustrator? You have collected some great data and information from research and now you want to make it look good?

We have a couple of simple steps using Piktochart. Are you willing to give it a shot?

To cater to both the visual and the auditory audiences, we have created two versions of how we created an infographic that looks like this. It can take about 1 hour to customize it according to the below if you have had no experience using Piktochart prior to this, but making an infographic is easy with Piktochart.

Give it a title

Add or change your data visualization by double clicking on the charts/graphs.

This is the spreadsheet where you can enter information manually. You can change the values, add columns, rows or upload an Excel friendly format of CSV file.

I then decided to get a map so that I can highlight what happens where. Under tools, I drag and drop the upload image icon and select the image. I tried searching on Google for the image.

After the image has been uploaded, I added a couple more dots and pieces to annotate it.

Instead of using the default circles, I preferred a bubble wrap so I used it as well.

Next for the favourite part of Piktocharting, I clicked on the colour changing menu until I came across the one I liked the most.

Was it easy to create an infographic or presentation with Piktochart? Share some thoughts as we will be rolling out version 2.0 soon!

The final product:

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Why Use Infographic Templates/Themes?

piktochart — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 03:29:50 +0000

Piktochart is an easy drag and drop infographic tool and our main sell at the moment is the ability to easily create infographics or a visual story out of your information. We want to help non-designers feel a bit like Picasso. At this moment of writing, we have 40 infographic templates/themes which are available and we are planning to add 3 more per week.

Users had some suggestions for Piktochart to implement on top of the infographic themes we are providing
Some of them would like to co-create infographic themes. We provide the platform, they drag and drop, change colours etc and then can choose to publish their infographic themes so that other people can use it. We quite like this model. It’s like opening Piktochart to the public and saying, hey, you can be Picasso and show the world that you are Picasso!

Secondly, others have asked us to consider a Threadless.com like model of crowdsourcing for designs. We would take a percentage of every theme sold. There is a “marketplace” of some sort that has to be built for this to happen and integrate seamlessly. There is a long lead time on development for this model. Therefore we have not seriously considered this yet

Disadvantages of using infographic templates/themes

We are all aware that there is a huge surplus of infographics which are created out there in the market. How do we then make sure that the information stands out and remains relevant to everyone? Having the same design could be a little bit of a bore, but if we considered that and other presentation tools such as Prezi, Powerpoint and Keynote which each has about 10-30 presentation templates …… Are templates still seen as a bad thing?

Piktochart enables the “Clear canvas” function which allows users to start from scratch and build their own infographic but we know that not many users use that. Most people are used to customize their presentations from an existing template, which is why we have a template-based format.

Do you have any suggestion to add to our theme/template based model? We would love to hear from you!

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Product Updates in Dec

piktochart — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:56:48 +0000

This is a long needed post, but we have not been able to update it as the holiday seasons were jolly and about.

Fixed Bug: Grouping and deleting will crash

Fixed Bug: Blank Background does not clear previous background when click on new

Fixed Bug: Current image is used to apply the overlay. So when you overlay the 2nd time onwards, it takes the overlaid image to overlay again, and again, and again.

Fixed Bug: Chart text disappears if you rotate the chart. Now it works.

New Feature: Read CSV files in Data Visualizer

New Feature: When need to add content in infographic, just click on “Add Block”, so that there is no manual work to be done by the user in order to stretch the canvas.

New Feature: Confirmation message when saving and exporting, in order to give the users an understanding that it has happened.

New Feature: New XML to fit in the mood/color/font swatches that we would like to implement so that users can change colors/text in one click.

New UI! We are working on a new UI since December and it’s still taking some time for us to completely shed the old skin and go into the new one… so hang in there!

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Granada

piktochart — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:53:35 +0000

Characteristics: Simple layout to be used for professional reports

Functionalities: All types of presentations

We created this infographic for Pulse Group, a market research company based in Kuala Lumpur. They collected data from a survey of over 120 organizations and these are the findings.

Market Research

Public Relations

Economic Outlook

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Christmas

piktochart — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:33:18 +0000

Characteristics: It’s for Christmas and it only rains Santa in Piktochart

Features: Circular data more for aesthetics. Happy Christmas from all of us at Piktochart!

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Pearlustre

piktochart — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:12:51 +0000

Characteristics: Vibrant, more for informational/marketing presentations

Features: Vertical story line, more information, less numbers.

P/S: This is our special feature for Penang, a home which most of us from Piktochart are based in. Send some love this way!

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