Visualizing the Hook: Getting People to the ‘Aha’ Moment of Your Infographic

These days, there is an overabundance of content. Every business is trying to reach consumers with articles, blog posts, images, infographics, videos, podcasts and more. Users are bombarded from every corner of the web with content that’s barely relevant, valuable or engaging. There is more content than you’ll ever be able to consume.

Kevin Kelly, author of 1,000 True Fans, puts it better: “While supply of content of all types is going to infinity, the total amount of available Attention remains essentially static”.

Even though attention per piece of content is dropping, keeping people engaged and consuming your content is more important than ever. If you get people to pay attention, which is the hardest thing to do online, you’ve won half the battle.

A great first step towards capturing attention is creating different types of content, like infographics. The problem is there are so many low quality infographics out there. People tend to think any infographic is a good infographic, so they copy and paste random text and overflow it with information. That’s far from the truth.

Designing a great, valuable infographic that stands out and deserves attention is tough, but here at Piktochart we want to share with you a secret that will help you design a memorable infographic. Follow along by creating a free account and customizing a template from the infographic gallery.

Making It Memorable By Creating A Hook

In plays or films, writers follow a dramatic structure. After the opening act, they guide the viewer through the story, until it reaches a turning point, a special moment that stays in your memory and changes the course of the story. That moment is called the climax, and it’s extremely powerful.

You can visualize it as a mountain, in which you slowly start ascending towards the action, and once you reach it, you slowly start descending towards the closing.

Luckily, there is a way of replicating that same effect in an infographic: the hook. You start soft, offering some introductory information, and then grab the reader by the hand and guide them through the content until you reach the most important point – the hook – in which you close the message, convey something specific or offer some impressive and memorable fact or piece of data.

But you might be wondering… how to create that hook? Well, it all starts even before you log in to Piktochart. In your head, in the conceptual phase when you plan how you will portray your information through design. This is how you should go about it:

1 – Plan your infographic. What topic will your infographic be about? Who’s the audience? What’s it purpose? How should it look like? What message are you trying to convey? Sit down for a minute, grab a cup of hot coffee, and think about these questions. They are a solid foundation to start from.

2 – Create a general layout. After answering all those initial questions, you should start designing how your infographic will look like. It’s extremely important to organize your information in a clear manner so it’s easy to read. If you need are a bit lost, this might give you a clue on where to start. If you need some inspiration, you can also check out these 5 first-time infographics that absolutely rock.

3 – Choose the right data or fact to use as a hook. It all starts with choosing the right data from the sea of information available. It should be shocking, exciting, surprising, jaw dropping. It should create some emotion in the reader, making your infographic memorable.

4 – Design your hook. Now that you know what’s the ‘Aha’ moment of your infographic, it’s important to convey it in your design. You should aim to use anything that higlights the hook, without moving further away from the base design. The lovely Piktochart designers suggest:

• strong, bold lines that separate the hook from the rest of the content.
• using a different color to bring up attention.
• increase font size, to show a higher hierarchy.
• use shapes, icons or memorable pictures to convey a message with images. As they say, an ‘image is worth a thousand words‘.

5 – Share it with your audience. Use Piktochart’s built in downloader, or share our magic link to start wowing your audience with a beautifully designed hook! Give it a try for free.

A Few Examples

There is no better way to absorb new knowledge than seeing amazing examples. Now, you’ll see how some clever designer laid out the information, making an impact and visualizing the hook in an intelligent way (using icons, text, shapes, etc) that made sense to their target audience and brings them closer to their ‘Aha’ moment.

Piktochart offers professional visuals for creating infographics, presentations, reports, and posters. Customize almost every element of a template. Visualize processes, heavy data, timelines and more. Add icons, illustrations, images, and charts. Get started for free.

There you go:

1 – Bill Gates Mind Blowing Infographic On Mosquitoes

What I really like about this design is that, at first, the infographic looks normal. A catching title, and some well-know, dangerous animals and their corresponding data. Then, the human appears: 425,000 deaths. Wow, impressive, but we kind of knew that. And then, BAM! The hook. The real killers, the most dangerous animal in the world, is the mosquito, with 725,000 human deaths per year.

I wasn’t expecting that. At all.

Designer of this infographic plays with the line thickness to emphasize on the deadly factor of each animal, creating hierarchy and building on tension. Then he uses color to highlight the key information: black for the human and eye-catching red for the mosquito.

2 – Counting The People Your Life Impacts

Funders & Founders is a non-profit that uses content and infographics to, according to their mission, “inspire everyone from engineers to moms to do a startup”. They usually do a great job at it, and this infographic isn’t the exception.

It’s a visual representation of how your life path would be, and how many people your work could positively affect if you decide to found a startup that later becomes successful. The design, which is simple yet impactful, grabs the reader by the hand through a really clear, and illustrated path.

The ‘Aha’ moment, which comes in almost at the end, is when they show the number – how many people you could positively affect. 198,000,000. Yes, that’s 198 million. Impressive, and inspirational! Green, more eye-catching color, is used to emphasize on the key message – “To make this partly happen. Do a startup.”

(Check out the full infographic here)

3 – Shark Attack Infographic

This is a fantastic example, because it’s quite different. Instead of creating a full infographic (with opening, hook, conclusion, etc), the author decided to design a simple, yet powerful mini-infographic and transform it into the hook that really impacts the viewer. All by using icons and striking colors.
Personally, I think it’s quite effective to visually see how sharks, who we think are extremely dangerous, barely cause victims, while us, humans, kill hundreds of sharks per hour.

This post is part of August’s Design Tip Series: 8 Insightful Posts That Will Help You Become A Creative Designer in Piktochart. Feel free to check it out!