As a company, we’ve mentioned a few times that we are heavily user-focused. We love talking to our users every week because we discover some profound insights we wouldn’t get anywhere else. We take all the feedback to heart and make improvements based on these learnings. One essential issue we discovered a few weeks ago is that the biggest obstacle for new Piktochart users is how to start and design their first infographic.
That’s the reason why we made June the month of ‘Designing Your First Infographic’, but we’ve decided to dig deeper and provide the ultimate guide for creating your first infographic. It’s a fantastic combination of tools, resources, blog posts and guides that will help you start off your first infographic with the right foot.
You’ll find some well-known resources for beginners, but if you are an expert don’t stop reading – you’ll find a couple of really interesting hidden gems.
Inspiration From Around The Web
Who said ‘copying’ is a bad thing? When you are new to something, taking a look at what experts did, and how they did it is a fantastic way to begin. For starters, it will help you avoid most rookie mistakes without doing it. Let’s take a quick look at 4 resources around the web you can use for inspiration.
- My go-to place for inspiration is Piktochart’s gallery. In it, you’ll find dozens of stunning infographic created by regular users, not design experts.
- A quick search on Pinterest for the query ‘infographics’ will show you some of the most popular infographics in the design world. This is a great place to check out if you want to look at what experts did. If you want to, you can get more specific with searches like ‘marketing infographics’ or ‘history infographics’.
- Usually, people see Dribbble as a web-design community, but it’s a great place to hang out, learn about design theory and take inspiration from.
- A few months ago, Giang, one of our team members, curated 25 ridiculously good infographics from around the web. You’ll find them in 25 Inspirations For Your Next Infographic.
Picking The Right Color Scheme
Picking the right colours palette for your infographic is a key step. You will need to take into account your audience, your imagery and your desired goal. For instance, if you are trying to create an infographic about Halloween, then black, orange and white will be the main colors in your palette.
Resources:
Tools:
- Colour Lovers is a fantastic tool that allows you to select predefined color palettes. We find the Most Loved Palletes Of All Times a really useful resource.
- Paletton is another great color tool that helps you pick the right color combination for your infographic. It’s strong feature is its ability to automatically pick colors that work well between each other.
- If you are more design-savvy, then Coolors is the perfect tool for you. It allows you to create beautiful color schemes quickly.
Picking The Right Typeface
Picking the right typeface for your design will define how the user perceives the information. For instance, goofy fonts are great for kid-related designs, and black sans serif fonts are optimal for readability. The problem is there are a lot of conflicting opinions on typography around the web so chances are you’ll feel overwhelmed. That’s why we’ve hand-picked some of the best resources around the web for you.
Resources:
- Typography I: How 4 Typeface Personalities Set The Tone of Your Infographics
- Typography II: 4 Things You Need To Know To Pair Fonts Well
- Choosing The Right Font: A Practical Guide For Typography On The Web
- Choosing The Right Font: A Guide To Typography in Design and UX
Tools:
- Font Squirrel is the go-to place in the web for discovering new, popular and beautiful fonts.
- If you are looking for fonts that are widely supported around the web, then Google Fonts is the place to look.
- If you want to keep things as easy as possible, Piktochart has a built-in font selector that allows you to pick the perfect typeface for your design from over dozens of different options.
Utilizing Stunning Photography
Every now and then you’ll want to use photos in your design, and knowing where to get beautiful, free to use stock photography that doesn’t suck is a really useful skill. Most of the pictures we use at Piktochart’s blog come from these 5 places:
- The team at Crew hand-picks 10 new photos every 10 days at Unsplash. It lacks a good search feature, but it has some high-quality pictures you’ll love.
- Death To The Stock Photo delivers a pack of high-quality images to your inbox each month. They also have a premium feature that allows you to access their entire library plus a bonus pack every month for $15/month. A definite no-brainer.
- Pexels and Stocksnap are two fantastic image search engines that aggregate free, high-quality, and beautiful photos from around the web.
- If you can shell out a small monthly subscription, Shutterstock is a great option, and frankly, the most complete of the 5 resources we just mentioned.
- We constantly update our Piktochart photo gallery with new unique photos (mostly taken by our team members who love photography and take stunning photographs during their travels). Stay tuned on this one as we’re about to introduce many new ones soon!
Where to Get Unique Icons
Icons are an essential part of infographic design. They act as visual support for written content, helping readers grasp and remember concepts or data much faster.
- If you use Piktochart, our built-in icon library has hundreds of free icons you could use for your design. Simply do a quick search for the icon you want (like ‘computer’), pick the icon you want and then drag and drop it into the block you want. Easy-peasy.
- IconFinder is a great icon search engine you could use to complement Piktochart’s icons. There are some really beautiful paid icons in there too.
- FindIcons has +475,000 free icons you can download for free instantly. The quality of the images aren’t as polished as the previous resources, but the sheer amount of icons they have can help you when you aren’t able to find the right icon anywhere else.
Become A Pro Designer Faster By Avoiding This Mistakes
As we mentioned before, learning from expert designers is a great way to avoid beginners mistakes while you create your first infographic. These 3 posts you’ll find below will help you prevent common pitfalls and newbie mistakes:
- 19 Warning Signs Your Infographic Stinks
- 6 Mistakes To Avoid When You Make an Infographic
- 3 Deadly Mistakes of Infographic
Are there any other tools you use in your infographic creation process? We’d love to hear about them and update our list! Let us know in the comments below.
