Back in the Piktochart headquarters, our lovely team of designers gets together every 2 weeks to brainstorm on new design inspirations… or just randomly type things into Google and pray for beautiful things! They then mindfully translate these new design inspirations into templates for you to use on Piktochart. Recently, the designer team discovered a new trend on the web, and decided to dive in on this topic: Real-Life Infographics.

With Piktochart, you can create professional-looking infographics in minutes. Simply create a free account and customize a template from the infographic gallery. Replace the text. Add icons, illustrations, images, and charts. Publish in PDF or PNG format and share with your audience. Get started now.

What are Real-Life Infographics?

Real-life infographics are essentially real-life imagery and photos used to represent data, or incorporated into a design to present information and data. These infographics tell stories in a unique way and can produce a level of resonance and emotional touch to your audience if executed well. Imagine yourself trying to depict the percentage of the earth’s forest that suffered from deforestation, and your information and data presented using the Earth as a pie chart. How impactful would that be!

Creating a Real-Life Infographic From Scratch

Infographics on food topics have always been an all-time high demand for our templates. Hence, we decided to go with just that – not to forget adding in a dose of real-life infographic design in the process. If you’re into photography, great – by starting from scratch, we even photographed the imagery needed for the template! It might not always work out for you that way, especially if you don’t have time. Keep in mind there are plenty of sites online to search for great photos that can help you get your message across in a real-life infographic design (for example, we love using Pexels for free stock photos).

Tips for before you start

• Before anything else, plan out the topic you’re sharing and determine the imagery you require for the real-life infographic design. Research and planning are always vital for an effective infographic!
• While we’re only covering food, the possible topics and events that can be made into a real-life infographic are countless. A lot of inspiring real-life infographic designs can be found on places like Pinterest.

Let’s begin the process:

1. Sketch the layout in which you want to present your information beforehand. This way, you have a more concrete idea to work towards and know where your photos will go, or how they will be used. This will lessen the time you need to spend when taking or looking for suitable photos. Remember: If you are taking photos yourself, take as many as possible! You wouldn’t know if you might adjust your layout later on, and require more specific photography angles or styles. After all, DIY doesn’t cost money!
   
   
2. Keep it simple. Limit other elements such as font colors and icons. With real-life imagery used on a large scale in this design theme, it’s hard to make it work by pairing them with vector icons or colorful text. We attached an example further below that utilizes only black and white colors. Simple, but it works wonderfully. Try to stick with no more than 3 colors at once.
3. Your imagery and design aim to present your information in an attractive and interactive way, but don’t forget to draft a good headline to enhance it’s effectiveness!
4. As for all infographics, we suggest keeping to a maximum of 3 fonts. Usually, one font for headlines and titles and another as a readable body text would be enough to make sure your infographic won’t be a pain to consume. The occasional third typeface/font could be used for narratives or subtitles.
5. If your infographic is not fully pictorial (as shown in our example), the masking tool on Piktochart would be your solution to merge images into shapes.

Three of our end products (also available as templates – just click on each of them to use them!). Sign up to get unlimited access!

There is so much to explore and present through real-life infographics. Creating recipes, travelling experiences and tips, education, even DIY projects! Everything is possible. Simply google the word “real-life infographic” and you will see tons of awesome, inspirational examples.

Feel free to share your comments or inspire us with your ideas! As for us, we are still creating more styles and templates for you every day. We hope to surprise you again with our next designers’ project this month!

Piktochart offers professional visuals for creating infographics, presentations, posters, and more. Collaborate with a team to save rounds of editing. Use your brand assets to personalize the template and more. Get started for free by creating an account.