Infographics 101
What’s your favorite medium to learn something new, or to become more informed?
Ever heard of an infographic?
Personally, I LOVE infographics. To be completely honest, my love for infographics derives partially from laziness. Why read an entire article to learn something when you can arrive at the same information through a simpler medium?
Essentially, hence the name, infographics combine information and visuals to get a certain idea across. Infographics are incredibly informative and can educate about anything from gender equality to how to make your favorite Starbucks drinks.
Last week, for a strategic public relations communication class, I got to make an infographic about whatever I wanted as long as it included a call to action. I thought about the things I’m passionate about, and ended up deciding on plastic pollution using information from https://marinesanctuary.org/.
Plastic pollution is a HUGE issue that is only getting exponentially worse, which is why I felt that it was important to focus on. I used https://www.canva.com/ to find a template, and eventually found the winner.
I began by doing some basic research, only focusing on the important statistics. Because of the template I used, I decided to find three big and scary stats that would be relevant to what I wanted to share. I ended finding three important categories with staggering numbers, being:
Amount of plastic consumed each year by the average American,
How much of the ocean is taken up by plastic pollution, and
Daily plastic pollution by the average American.
I also put those three scary numbers in boxes, to stand out amongst the words.
Then, I decided to include a heartbreaking statistic in big, centered, and bolded words. I also used the color yellow to again highlight the actual numbers amongst the sentences. It read:
“One million seabirds & 100,000 marine animals are killed each year by plastic entanglement”.
Lastly, I decided to talk about humans and how plastic affects us, too. I used the phrasing, “& what about us”, with an arrow to the right of it pointing to a pie chart for visual and dramatic effect. The pie chart showed the statistic that 93% of humans above the age of six test positive for BPA, a chemical found in plastic.
Beneath is a big, bolded, yellow quote reading: “Save Our Oceans. End Plastic Pollution”.
Through this infographic, I was targeting all sorts of consumers, particularly consumers of plastic (which truly, is most of us). Additionally, this could be targeted towards companies that use plastic in or alongside their products. Plastic surrounds this world, and anyone and everyone needs to be aware of the repercussions.
A big challenge I faced while creating this infographic was deciding which facts were right for the story I wanted to tell. There’s so much information out there as to what plastic is doing to our environment that there’s not a chance I could even fit 1/16th of good information on the page. Narrowing it down was a struggle to say the least. Another challenge I faced was simply with the program-- trying to figure out how to navigate my template and personalize it to what I wanted was time consuming and a learning process.
On top of everything, creating infographics is fun! I feel like there’s the perfect amount of creativity and structure, which in my opinion, is a VERY important balance.
If you were to create an infographic, what would you make it about??
Xo,
Sarah
(P.S My infographic is the thumbnail of this blog! Check it out!)