World's Best Infographics

Just because you have an infographic designed does not mean it’s ready to go. There are a few more steps necessary to ensure success. You need to proofread. You need to publish. And, of course, you need to promote. Basically, you need to know how to optimize your infographic to get the most traffic.

Unfortunately, we see many brands make rookie mistakes in all three of these areas. Whether it’s an unoptimized file name, broken share buttons, or pixelated images, these details can seriously hurt your infographic’s success. If you want to get the most eyes on your infographic, there’s more to do than you think. But don’t worry.

Because our parent company Column Five likes to make things easier for you, they created this handy checklist to help you optimize your next infographic. They even put it in infographic form and checklist form. Feel free to print them out, bookmark them, or embed them on your site.

Follow their tips and you’ll know your infographic is really ready to be published. On that note, you can also take a look at these deep dives into how to optimize your infographic for SEO and how to optimize your blogfor content distribution. Good luck out there!...

So why are some infographics destined to die in obscurity while others get passed along to every corner of the web?

Content marketing researchers have been burning the midnight oil trying to figure out how to reliably produce viral content. After observing and analyzing a thousand different infographics across multiple industries and platforms, the team at SiegeMedia collected some interesting insights and patterns. As it turns out, going viral isn't entirely up to the hands of fate - the most popular content shared certain key characteristics.

Take a look at the following visual and learn what makes an infographic popular...

The following infographic, created by Zhenia Vasiliev, breaks down the basics of data visualization. It shows how beginners can merge form and function, and design meaningful infographics.

Key highlights:

-  Analyse your data: Analysis is the key. Before we can visualize the data we need to understand it.

-  Come up with a story: Story is finding a single strand of meaning in an endless sea of information. It has a beginning, middle and end.

-  Make it visible: Visualization is a creative act of making. Making the data visually elegant evident and engaging.

-  Entertain to educate: Good data design need to illuminate and inform the viewer, elucidate and illustrate the facts and stats....

Every year people proclaim the death of something or other in marketing -- and the death of the infographic doesn't escape conversation. It's probably because while more people have caught on to the power of infographics for communications or marketing initiatives, not all of them are doing it well -- so it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

These 15, however, managed to stand out. My criteria here were not scientific. I looked for infographics that I simply could not stop reading til the very end -- or in the case of the interactive ones in the latter half of this post, the ones I couldn't stop exploring. Enjoy perusing the best of what 2014's infographics had to offer, ranked in no particular order (except for #1 -- I love #1)....

Think back to your first memory: Can you still see the watermelon pink dress you wore? Do you remember the unique checkered pattern of your father's jacket?

Our memories are often linked to visual and sensory elements, while the words spoken or read can be more hazy. That's because our brains have a high capacity for storing visuals in our long-term memory, while text enters our working memory, which is limited. 

This contributes to why infographics and the inclusion of visual content in online information has been so successful. Readers crave visual breaks from the overload of text-based information that floods our daily browsing and work-related activities. 

NeoMam Studios studied how people process visual information, how visuals affect the way we read, and why graphics are so appealing. Discover the science behind why our brains crave infographics....

This infographic about infographics utilizes a cool blueprint flowchart concept.. something you’d think of as stereotypical for a blueprint. It’s cool, but it might be a tad ironic – it’s harder to read than you’d like it to be. Let’s jump into the things that you should focus on to make sure your infographic looks simple, readable and beautiful.