4 Free Tools For Making Amazing Infographics
In the last five years, infographics have become one of the most powerful marketing tools on the web. Mixing design, writing, and data analysis, infographics are a visually compelling communication medium that greatly assists your readers in understanding complex information by breaking down key points. Infographics are ideal for supplementing long-form studies, as they make the information significantly more digestible.
For many of you, infographics may look like they require a lot of work and design experience, which in the past they did. Today, however, remarkable tools exist online to walk you through the infographic process step-by-step, with no design experience required.
In this post we’ll be going over four free tools that can help your company start producing beautiful infographics for your marketing and presentation efforts.
1. Canva
Canva makes it incredibly efficient to whip out colorful designs in as little as five minutes. Their interface is built much like a website builder, in that what you see, is what you get. Each design stems from popular formats like social media photos, blog designs, presentations formats and more.
Once you have the layout in place, you can sift through different ‘elements’ (grids, shapes, photos, charts) to add the overall infographic flare. The interface makes it easy to align different elements, while incorporating custom text and graphics.
Cost: Free, available upgrade $9.95/month
2. Piktochart
Piktochart is a little different in the sense that its formats focuses a lot more on business designs. With four primary starting points (Infographic (tall&skinny), Report, Poster, and presentation for slide decks), you can create your own from scratch, or start with one of their many templates.
Much like Canva, once you have a template/format in place you can begin dragging different graphical elements and text to your canvas.
Cost: Free, with upgrades starting at $15/month
3. Easel.ly
Although Easel.ly doesn’t have as many free templates as the prior two options, the ones they do provide are exceptionally well designed and incredibly easy to use.
Within the dashboard you have all of your design options laid out in an intuitive interface that any beginner will be able to grasp in minutes. While there aren’t as many free templates as some of the other sites I’ve mentioned, the ones they do give you have extraordinary design value.
4. Venngage
Very similar to Canva’s interface, Venngage follows a three step process in which you 1. Choose a template 2. Add Charts, Visuals or Graphics 3. Customize your design with unique text and layout.
What I like most, is the diversity in particular topics and categories from which templates begin. With options like:
- Statistical
- Informational
- Comparison
- Process
- Geographic
- Timeline
- Charts
- Tutorial
The flexible grids give you complete control over how the final layout looks, while still providing automatic alignment tools.
