17 Resources to Help You Create Killer Infographics

In the previous post, Alexis provided some great tips for designing awesome infographics. Infographics are very popular and if you have the right tools, you can simply create it from scratch without even hiring a freelancer or a designer.

Graphics and visuals get more attention than boring texts. Pinterest is one live example. As I promised earlier, today, I am going to post all the online resources and tools that I use to create and design infographics. There are definitely more than 17 resources out there but I am going to stick with the ones I know about. As a matter of fact, you really don’t need ton of tools to create decent infographics. Just use the ones mentioned on this post and I bet you will produce some killer infographics that might even go viral.

Infographic Creators, Tools & Resources

1. Chart Gizmo

They have both free and paid account. Just use free account and you will be able to create charts for your website, blog and social network profiles. Chart Gizmo is pretty useful for those who need to visualize financial, scientific or other type of data. There are several features including import/export data from Excel, Unicode languages, etc.

2. Creately

According to Creately, they are focused on making it easier for teams to work collaboratively on all things visual. Some of the features include one click styling, pretty shapes, curvy connectors, smooth real-time collaboration, project management, inline commenting, one click publishing, team management and more. They have a pretty neat user interface and I highly recommend them.

3. Easelly

Create and share visual ideas online using easelly. This is one of my favourite since it’s powered by wordpress. Simply drag and drop a theme onto your canvas for easy creation of your visual idea. Check it out 🙂

4. Good Labs

GOOD is a collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits pushing the world forward. They have been making a magazine, videos, and events for people who give a damn since 2006. Nothing really fancy with their infographic creator but you can create some cool pie charts.

5. Visually

One of my favourites and yours will be too. Browse their gallery and choose an infographic you want to customize. You no longer need expensive software, extensive design skills, or number crunching ability. Their online tool allows everyone to quickly and easily create professional quality designs with their own data. And once done, you could publish it on your Visual.ly profile.

6. Infogram

Sounds like instagram but looks even cooler. They work with great designers to bring you the best components and themes for your infographics. Simply pick whatever you like to build your own. I think they are very cool and it really feels like you are using Adobe Illustrator online.

7. Online Charts Builder

This was developed by Anton Shevchuk. Pretty neat site that allows you to create 3D Pie charts of various shapes and form. You can easily create charts using this tool and use it on your infographic.

8. Piktochart

Information is supposed to be fun and exciting, not dull and boring and that’s why piktochart was born. They started off with a web application to create infographics. They have both free and paid version so check them out. There is also a demo video on their website.

9. Tableau Software

Tableau Public is a free tool that brings data to life. Easy to use and spectacularly powerful. Tableau Public is for anyone who likes to post content to the web. Please note: this is a desktop tool that you need to download and not a web application like the most. Download Tableau Public then visit their training page for resources to help you get started.

10. Venngage

Venngage helps to create and publish custom infographics, engage your viewers, and track your results. They claim to be the most powerful infographics publishing platform ever for marketers and publishers.

11. Wordle

Wordle is a web application for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. I am sure you have seen cloud tags on several blogs. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. This is a good add-on to the infographics. You can use the pictures on your blog, social profiles or anyway you want to. You can even print them out and share it with your friends.

12. Many Eyes

An experiment brought to you by IBM Research and the IBM Cognos software group. After you choose a data set, you must choose a visualization method. Many Eyes provides a variety of visualization methods. Visit their site for more details.

13. Dipity

Dipity allows users to create free timelines online. I have used it once and I am in love with it. It helps you organize the web’s content by date and time; chronological order. You can create, share, embed and collaborate on interactive, visually engaging timelines that integrate video, audio, images, text, links, social media, location and timestamps. Digital timelines are a great way to increase traffic and user engagement on your website.

14. Intel’s What about me

This is an online tool developed by Intel that helps to create an infographic of your digital life. It’s a cool way to get inspired by the people you know, the things you see, and the experiences you have online. Give it a try and let the result amaze you.

Bonus: Infographic Data Sources

To create a killer infographic, you have to make sure that the data is relevant and accurate. Without credible sources, an infographic is pretty much useless. There are several databases and online sources from where you can collect data (simply google for information); however, I have found 3 sites which I use frequently for data collection and analysis and I am posting them below. There will be more added in the future once I discover them 🙂

1. Daytum

Whether you would like to tally an afternoon or a year, Daytum can help you collect and communicate the most important statistics in your life. An up-to-the-moment personal dashboard or as a corporate tool, the uses for Daytum may be limitless. It has both free and paid plans for some extra features. I suggest you check it out.

2. Google Public Data

This doesn’t require any definition or explanation. You have an entire database at your finger tips.

3. Gapminder

There’s nothing boring about statistics. They have some huge collection of data and resources which might come in handy.

Verdict

Infographics are super cool and they have huge potential to go viral. I will write a detailed post on how to market your infographic in the future but for now, I suggest that you check out Neil’s post on getting your infographic to go viral.

Coincidently, Neil made the post today while I was working on this :). I guess he made my work a little easier. However, I will have my own version soon and I hope you guys use all these tools and resources to your advantage and create a killer infographic. Let me know if I missed out any other cool infographic tools.