How to Make Cool Infographics That Enhance Your Copy

Zzzzzzzz.

That’s the sound of your reader’s snores as she faces a wall of text that includes lists, numbers, percentages, statistics or other dry information.

What a shame.

Because you need your reader to absorb those numbers and factoids. You want her to understand their relevance. You’d like her to process those statistics so she can…

• Compare and contrast
• Form an opinion
• Convert—take an action you’ve identified

How can you get dull figures and data to mean as much to her as they do to you?

Create a picture worth a thousand words.

Stop telling her about your data with words and start showing her: Present your statistics visually.

Oh. Charts and graphs. Yawn.

No, not your typical mind-numbing templates—the kind Seth Godin calls “a horrible tragedy.”

You can create dynamic, powerful—and attractive—visuals using infographics from Many Eyes, an experimental application funded by IBM.

Many Eyes provides a wide variety of different visualizations that let you:

• See relationships
• Compare value sets
• Track rises and falls
• See parts of a whole
• Analyze texts

Make your dull data dynamic.

Here’s a word tree visualization analyzing the word “I” in Cassius’ speech from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare:



And a bar chart comparing various US copywriters’ incomes:

And here’s a comparison of oil spills 1967-1992:

(For analysis of April 2010′s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, see Wikipedia.)

Experiment with your own data using Many Eyes—and feel free to post links to your infographics in your comments below.

Tagged as: Blog post by New York marketing copywriter Lorraine Thompson, How to Make Cool Infographics That Enhance your Copy, How to turn dull data into cool inforgraphics, Use Many Eyes to Enhance Your Copy