Infographics are everywhere this year. Every blog I read has one, and they get shared like crazy. So I finally sat down and made my own, a simple one full of numbers about a topic I knew people cared about.
It took me way longer than I expected. And it taught me a bunch of things I did not know before I started.
The design was not the hard part
I assumed the hard part would be making it look nice. It was not. The hard part was the story. My first draft was just a pile of stats stacked on top of each other, and it was boring even to me. A good infographic is not a list of facts. It walks you from a question to an answer, and the numbers are the steps. Once I reordered it so it told a little story, it clicked.
What made it travel
I put it on the blog, wrote a short intro, and gave people an easy way to grab the image and embed it on their own sites with a link back to me. That last part mattered more than anything. People do not want to write about your topic from scratch, but they will happily post your nice picture if you make it one copy and paste away.
Within a couple of weeks it showed up on a few sites I had nothing to do with, each one linking back. Those are exactly the kind of links Penguin does not punish, because they are real, from people who genuinely wanted to share the thing.
What I would do differently
I would spend half the time on the design and twice the time on picking data worth looking at. A beautiful infographic about nothing goes nowhere. An ugly one full of surprising, useful numbers still gets shared.
I am definitely making more of these. But now I know the work happens before I ever open the design tool.
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