May 31, 2012
Infogr.am makes you look like you're a pro at infographics
I made my first infographic yesterday — not because I suddenly became talented, but because of infogr.am. Of the recent web apps making the foray into easy infographics, this is the best one I’ve come across so far.
After logging in, infogr.am presents you with five templates for infographics and five templates for charts — although they all seem like infographics to me. Once you’ve made your choice might be dismayed to find that you didn’t really get what you wanted. For example, a template showing a pie chart will come out as a line chart. But fear not. The edit interface allows you to bring whatever type of chart you like — bar, pie, matrix or line.
In addition, you can add pictures, titles, text and quotes. A nice touch is that once the graphic is complete, you can hover over the charts and get little popups showing the numbers represented by the various sections.
You do of course need data, and inputting it can be a lot more fun than you might expect. As you place figures into a spreadsheet, the graphics bounce around to reflect them.
The design in every case is first class, and you’ll be happy to add it to any of your projects. I did have one little problem, though. One of the templates shows cartoon frogs sticking out their tongues in different lengths depending on the numbers. Darned if I could get it to work.
If you’re at all interested in exploring infographics, be sure to give infogr.am a try. There’s certainly no harm and playing around with it. And once you get past the learning curve, you’ll find infographics come easily.
Just remember that infogr.am is still in beta, so bugs (like the frog graphic) should be forgiven. Also, there is a promise of more features in the future — I’m looking forward to them.
In the meantime, take at look at my first effort, a graphic look at the latest census figures for Kamloops.