In trying to come up with a fun way to present what we have done this year in a visually pleasing way, I decided to jump on the infographic bandwagon. Infographics have become very popular in recent years because society has evolved into highly visual communicators. Infographs breakdown data into digestible chunks then present them in a visual way that highlights the information take-aways. This allows your audience to learn at a quick glance what would have formerly been a stiff report.
Most college students never stop to wonder about the volume of what we do in the library day-in and day-out. They sure aren't reading our annual reports! To help put what we do on their radar, I pulled some of our larger numbers from all of the library's departments and created a visual that we will use on all of our social media platforms, as well as in presentations and orientations.
Here is the final product:
Honestly, tracking down the numbers and deciding which to highlight was the most difficult part of this project. That is to say, it was not difficult, though it was time consuming until I got the hang of using the program. Usually I have my graphic design intern work on these types of projects because he has mad skills. Since we are at the end of the year, however, and he is busy preparing as much as possible for our beginning of Spring semester projects before break, I decided to do it myself.
I went with Canva because it was free and I used their graphics mixed with free vectors from PNGTree. You can pull two free graphics a day from PNGTree, so there was no choice but to spread out the project through the week. Canva is fairly straightforward in its use. They have a good selection of free infographic templates that offer easy click and replace graphics and texts.
If Canva is not your thing, you could always use Power Point, though there is no PP infographic templates. This means you are creating from scratch and that may be done easier in Adobe Illustrator. Here is an article from Creative Bloq listing other Infographic tools on the web. The best part? Most of them are free!
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