My first honest-to-goodness post for my new digital strategy community on Google+ talks about how creators of infographics seem to have missed their original intention. Instead of conveying data and information through design and using minimal text— and only when necessary— infographics are flooded with text. Paragraphs of text.
Remember back in the 90s when we wanted to use fonts other than Arial, Verdana, Times Roman, etc., on our websites? We actually used jpgs. Well, that’s what these kinds of infographics are. A website made during the 1990s when no one was paying much attention to accessibility.
STOP IT!
Infographics = INFOrmation depicted GRAPHICally
Wordy infographics = death by PowerPoint
Further, it’s hard to read infographics in a browser. They are one loooooooooooong graphic which ends up being shrunk down to the unreadable category. And some mobile apps don’t display them properly.
Infographics are only good on a blog post. However, once you try to share them (after all, we’re living in the social media age now), say in Pinterest, the loooooooooooong graphic gets cut off and the original link to the blog post may get lost.
Please leave the loooooooooooong infographics for the medium they have always been intended to be: print.
Anyhoo, more about this on my G+ post.