10 Useful Tools for Creating Infographics and Visualizations

Communication is best done with visual aids. People tend to understand something better with images or graphics. Complex concepts are simplified by visual representations. There is no better and effective way to deliver a message across than by visualizations. But, the graphics must be clear and concise in conveying the right message. And even website owners recognize that visitors tend to interact with the page if they have interesting graphics accompanying the text or any content.

The following are 10 tools you can use to create infographics and visualizations that will help you communicate visually with everybody.

1. Make a video. If you can, hire a graphics artist or illustration artist to create a visual communication and infographics. The illustration artist should be able to animate the concept and turn the verbal script into an interesting infographic and visualization.
2. Tableau. This is not a web-based tool, but has some free tools for creating data visualizations. The tool allows uploading a spreadsheet or CSV and creates a variety of interactive data visualizations types. Tableau has a gallery of interesting types of visualization concepts.
3. Infogr.am. This is another free, web-based tool with nice themes and a great interface to help create simple infographics. Charts can be created using real data and there are 31 chart options with really cool displays such as bubble graphs, map charts, scatter charts, etc. When the infographic is finished, you can just embed it on a website and publish it to the infogr.am site.
4. Visual.ly. This is a community platform for data visualization and infographics. This integrates with social networks that analyzes Twitter and Facebook data. It allows creating fun Venn diagrams, Twitter account showdowns, or visuals that analyze hashtags, etc. Only, no customization is allowed.
5. Balsamiq. This is another wireframing tool to create simple web and mobile diagrams. This is not a free tool (with only a free web demo) but the desktop version would not cost you a fortune.
6. OmniGraffle. This is a desktop application with an intuitive interface and an effective tool for wireframing. It allows customization and stylizing objects good enough to create infographics. There are free downloadable stencils which make it easy to create mobile and web interfaces. However, it’s only offered for Mac and professional and standard versions are offered for a fee.
7. Easel.ly. This is another free web-based tool to help create infographs. With this tool, real data cannot be used to create graphs. However, for conceptual visualization and storytelling, it’s a really good tool. It has a beautiful user interface and gorgeous themes which support many common purposes – flowchart, map, graphing, etc. It has a library of well-design objects and backgrounds. The free version allows uploading your own images.
8. Present.me. This tool allows you to create presentations where you can record yourself talking next to the slides you are presenting. It is usually used by people working remotely to share a proposal or concept.
9. Piktochart. This is a web-based tool with 6 decent free themes to help create simple visualizations. Different shapes and images are easily “dragged and dropped”, but with a bit of customization offered. It’s easy to add a simple line, bar, or pie charts using data from CSV. Files can be exported to PNG and JPG formats in print or web quality. The free version puts a small Piktochart watermark on the bottom of the PNG or JPG downloads. If you want no watermark, there’s the paid version.
10. TimelineJS. This tool uses a Google spreadsheet with links to YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Sound Cloud and other media sources. This can be used to create an interactive visualization and for attractive timelines.

These tools will make your task a lot easier and will help you be at your best in terms of creativity and in increasing your productivity level. Start doing your own infographics or visual illustrations with the use of any of the tools presented here.

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