Meditation on Infographics (edit 8)
Infographics have a unique ability to turn uninteresting and tedious material into an enriching consumption experience. Working in digital marketing, I’ve personally become fond of infographics for their utility in content marketing. Through my work experiences where I specialize in search engine optimization, I’ve learned that infographics work magic when it comes to consumer-accessibility. As a generator of content, you strive to maximize your efficiency in truly reaching your target audience – and there is no better way to go about this than creating an aesthetically pleasing and engaging infographic.
There’s statistical evidence that infographics are much more likely to be easily-digested by the medium consumer. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual – so why would a content-creator create unnecessary steps for the consumer in terms of decoding information (text to visual) and recoding information (visual to brain), when they could eliminate that barrier? Also, 40% of the population are visual learners. With the continued advancement of graphic design, purely text articles are becoming obsolete in today’s multimodal world.
Infographics have the ability to gather information from what would otherwise be a page worth of text – and most likely read over – and organize it in a an appealing way that captivates the consumer’s attention both immediately and throughout the information.
I’ve included an example of an infographic on coffee below:
This infographic is able to organize loads of information and present it in a way that preserves interest throughout. If this example was a text article, it would simply take too many words to convey this message on how different coffees are brewed (not to mention most people would not be emotionally invested enough to read the entire article). However, with this infographic, the consumer is able to digest all of this information in the order of their choice from a visually captivating medium. Like many others, I am a visual learner – and there is no better way to reach your target audience than an attractive infographic. Infographics are a rising form of medium and I think another great opportunity resides in classrooms and textbooks – this would be an excellent way to reach students who require a more visual-learning experience. Personally, I would love a textbook full of charts and graphs rather than skimming over boring and mind-numbing text. Infographics are the medium of the future in terms of how we consume our content, and we should embrace every bit of it. I’ve also included an infographic I created that represents a substitute for our course syllabus – I think students are much more likely to examine all the information in an infographic rather than a bland word document full of text.
