How to create an infographic for free online

You see them everywhere. Infographics that look like they’re designed by top notch artists, and you wonder how to get one for your own company or brand.  While some of them are, in fact, created by incredible artists, you can use online tools to create them for free or at a low cost if you want to remove their branding.

I recently stumbled upon Venngage and created my first infographic.  Work of art? Not necessarily, but certainly decent enough to share.  The core service is free but includes Venngage’s branding.  If you want to remove that and download your infographic to PDF or PNG format, you’ll need one of their premium plans which start at $19 per month.  The tool was super easy to use and includes quite a few templates, but you can also start from scratch and drag & drop icons, pictograms, maps and much more.  There are some competitive services out there like Piktochart, but I haven’t had a chance to try them out.

As you’re getting started, you’re probably wondering what makes an infographic go viral. While this doesn’t really cover topics, I ran across an article that highlights the science behind viral infographics – colors, # of words, etc.

If you need something that is above and beyond what you can create yourself online, and want to find a designer to create something for you, you can tap an agency like Lemonly to create an infographic.

I also learned that it’s tough to get traction for that infographic on social media, but here’s a handy guide to get you started.  The formatting does seem to be the biggest issue I ran across – and if your goal is to get traffic over to your site, you will only want to show a teaser as they suggested.

As a bonus, Venngage was also really useful for creating a one-sheeter for my other site.  This is pretty basic, but still looks better than what people whip up in Word!

one-sheeter-example