Infographics Made Easy

While you can ask students to design these from scratch, few will have the design experience or tech skills to do this effectively, and even if they do, the inordinate amount of time this will take, is not time you are likely to be able to spare. That's why using a site like Canva, or Piktochart is so useful, no doubt there are/will be others. Using one of these tools—assuming your students have done their research, they can produce a decent looking infographic in a couple of double lessons, win win!

Choose the right template.

First things first, is it really an Infographic that you want? Or would a poster be more appropriate? More on the differences here, but if all you want is one bold image, and minimal text that can print our on 'normal sized' paper (A4 or A3) then a poster template is probably more appropriate, even if you want more than minimal information, a poster template will work well for an 'Infoposter'.

Stick to the template!

These templates were designed by professional designers who know what they are doing, following design principles that should be respected. That means you stick to the template as closely as possible, the colour schemes, the fonts, the layout, the amount of content, the more you depart from the original design, the worse the final infographic will look.

Avoid Premium Elements!

The sites provide a load of free content, mainly templates, but once you start trying to use the elements (icons, illustrations) you will find fewer elements that are free to use. Unless you are prepared to spend money, or have a great big watermark emblazoned across your creation, avoid premium elements, instead...

Get your own Elements FREE from Google!

Do an image search in Google, but use the tools to search for transparent images as they’ll be going in front of other images (under the colour options) and note the size of the images in pixels, for icons 300 pixels or so is fine, for background/main images about a width of at least 1000 pixels is better. If images are small they will look blurry if enlarged, if they are huge (>1500 pixels) they will really slow down you work if you’re using lots of them (even if you squeeze them down to a smaller size, it’s still huge, just squished into a smaller space).

Customise Images

You can resize large images using Preview, you should use pixels as the unit of measurement. You might find an image which is close to what you want, but not quite, so in Preview you can make basic changes: crop, adjust the image colours, delete a plain colour background and save it as a PNG file so it stays transparent.

For reasons yet to be determined, sometimes the Google sign in option doesn't work, in this case just create an account using your school email (with @gapps) and your school email, and you should be able to sign in. After this you should be able to sign in with Google.

Background images can work really well, just turn the transparency right down and move it to the back, try to crop the image first to it's the same proportion as the template.