Infographic Tools and Tutorials

The following list of tools used to create infographics are ones I found to be most popular. I'm hoping to continue adding to this list. If you know of any good applications for generating infographics that are not listed here, please email me at amyhissom@comcast.net and I will add them here. Make sure you send me the name of the app, the link to where it can be found, and a brief description.

Canva

Canva is a simple, drag-and-drop, design software that’s completely online and free to use. Engage your audience with professional infographics for your newsletters, blog content, reports and more.


 

Piktochart

Piktochart is a simple online application for a non-designer to create customized infographics easily. All you need is to drag, drop and voilà! Informative yet stunning visuals can be created with just a few clicks. Since it is hosted on the cloud, there is no need to download and install the editor on the computer.

Piktochart Introduction

Getting started on Piktochart V3 - The Piktochart team created a guide to help you get started in creating infographics of your own.


Visual.ly

Visual.ly is a great tool that allows you to generate a range of infographics almost instantly based on social metrics such as Twitter or Facebook data. You can even create an infographic resume or one using the data from your website's Google analytics. Check out my creations below.

Visual.ly Tutorial

AmyHissom.Com Statistics for November 8 - 13

Thompson Park's Facebook Page Stats

East Liverpool, Ohio Demographic Analysis


Many Eyes

Many Eyes is an experiment brought to you by IBM Research and the IBM Cognos software group that allows you to upload your own data or use data stored on the site to create professional visualisations. After you choose a data set, you must choose a visualization method. Many Eyes provides a variety of visualization methods.

How to Use Many Eyes - A video tutorial.


Vizualize.me

Visualize.me enables people to express their professional accomplishments in a simple yet compelling personal visualization. Users can connect to their LinkedIn profile or enter their own data to generate a visually appealing resume. See mine below!

Visualize.me Tutorials - This is a great list of video tutorials but you must sign up for a free Grovo account to watch them.

Amy Hissom Resume


Infogr.am

Infogram enables you to illustrate data in an interactive format through the creation of more than 30 chart types. Anything from bubble charts and treemaps to simple pie charts. It has a built-in spreadsheet for easy data editing. You can also import your XLS, XLSX and CSV file. you can publish your infographic online, share with your followers in social networks. Or simply embed it in your blog post or news article.

More About Infogr.am

Infogr.am Tutorial

Tri-State Cab - I found some cab fare data on the Internet and created my own Excel spreadsheet with it to create this infographic using Infogram for my dad's cab company. Check it out!


Vizify

Vizify enables you to create an interactive infographic using the data from your social networking accounts. Just plug in your social media sites and Vizify creates a series of interactive infographics that show the best of you. You can even create a video of your profile. Check out the following tutorial!

How to Make a Twitter Profile Video with Vizify

Amy Hissom's Vizify - Check out my Vizify!


Creately

Creately is a visual collaboration platform used by project teams to communicate more effectively. With Creately's easy to use interface and Shared Projects, everyone on your design, development and business teams can collaborate on software designs, wireframes, business & strategy diagrams easily.

Creately Features

Creately Examples

Creately Demo Video

Creately Video Tutorials

20 Social Media Sites - A bit shabby, but this is my interactive infographic created using Creately. Check it out!


Stat Silk

Stat Silk offers three applications that include StatPlanet, StatTrends, and StatWorlds.

StatPlanet (formerly StatPlanet Map Maker) is a free, award-winning application for creating interactive maps which are fully customizable. In addition to maps, the software also has the option of including interactive graphs and charts to create feature-rich infographics. For more advanced features, including additional maps, support for large data sets (StatPlanet has a limit of 5 indicators), importing maps, export options and more, see StatPlanet Plus. To create a simple interactive map with a more basic set of features, please see StatPlanet Lite. Data can also be copied and pasted directly into StatPlanet using this experimental map creator tool. StatPlanet includes the World and USA maps. For additional maps, please see: download free shapefile maps.

StatTrends is a free web-based application for embedding interactive charts and graphs into your web-pages. A desktop version is also included. Creating your own charts and graphs is easy. Just use Excel or other spreadsheet software to insert or import data. No programming is required. StatTrends has a limit of 6 indicators. StatTrends Plus is a more advanced version of StatTrends with no indicator limit and many extra features. For creating interactive maps, please see StatPlanet.

Stat Silk User Guide - Includes links to video tutorials.


Hohli Charts

Hohli Charts is an easy-to-use online chart maker. You can customize the look and feel of your chart. Just pick your chart type, add your data, and vary the sizes/colors. There are a few advantages of using Hohli Charts. It generates a link to your chart, no login is required. A tutorial, as well as an example that I created are listed below.

Hohli Charts Tutorial

Ohio Cab Fares


Google Public Data Explorer

Google Public Data Explorer is a very useful way to use public data to transform it into an infographic of your choice. It allows anyone with a Google account to create visualizations of public data sets. You can choose from numerous existing data sets or use your own data. It is perfect for creating attractive and colourful graphics to display your data. To use your own data you need to use the new Data Set Publishing Language (DSPL) developed by Google. The process of uploading data in the DSPL format isn't something you'll learn in minutes, but if you're really interested in doing it Google does have a step-by-step tutorial for you to follow. Regardles of whether you use your own data or the plethora of data Google provides, each visualization you create has a unique url that you can direct people to or you can embed the visualization in a blog or website. The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

About the Public Data Explorer

Google Public Data Help

Google Public Data Explorer - A few tips on how to use the Google Public Data Explorer to display data visualizations, with an emphasis on classroom possibilities.


Tagxedo

Tagxedo turns words -- famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters -- into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

101 Ways to Use Tagxedo - This is a presentation that explains many ways of using Tagxedo and each use is accompanied by at least one example.

Web 2.0 Apps - An example Tagxedo word cloud I created using all the text from a paper I recently wrote that covered new Web 2.0 applications.


Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. This application is what I used to create the word cloud located on the "Introduction" page of this Website. Wordles can be created by pasting in a bunch of text or

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - My example.


Cacoo

Cacoo is a user friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site map, flowchart, mind map, wire frame, UML diagram and network diagram. Cacoo can be used free of charge.

Cacoo Samples

Ohio Puppy Connection - The wireframe I created for my puppy website using Cacoo.

Cacoo Tutorial Part 1 and Cacoo Tutorial Part 2 - How to get started with Cacoo, how to make a mind map, diagram organization, settings, how to share your mindmap, edit in a group, and save your creation.


Chart Gizmo

Do you have figures that you instantly want to make a comparison chart out of it? ChartGizmo is an online service that generates charts on the fly by talking your input into count. It’s free to use , only requiring sign-up. Generating charts are pretty straight forward. ChartGizmo supports 3 type of charts; bar, pie and line chart. For every chart created, you can also save them as HTML and share with your peers. ChartGizmo enbles you to create charts for your website, blog and social network profiles and is useful for those who need to visualize financial, scientific or other type of data. Charts can be created by entering the data manually or importing a data set.

Chart Gizmo Examples


Easel.ly

Easel.ly is a theme-based Web application for creating infographics and visualizations. All you need to do is drag, edit, save, and share all through the use of a canvas.

Easel.ly Introduction

Easel.ly Tutorial for Educators - How to create infographics with your students.

Easel.ly Tutorial - How to use the website easel.ly to create infographics.


Tableau Public

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. Also, read about How it Works and visit the Gallery to see example of works others have created.


Venngage

Venngage is a Centralized Analytics and Reporting application that works with all social media and web analytics channels to give you the complete picture of your social marketing campaigns - tracking performance from social platforms to conversions and revenue on your website. 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.

Venngage Introduction


Dipity

Dipity is a free digital timeline website. Users 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. Dipity is the fastest and easiest way to bring history to life with stunning multimedia timelines. Read more about Dipity here. This is an awesome tool. I really like that the timelines you create can be viewed in different ways. Not only are readers able to view your creation as a timeline, they can also view the events you added in a list of clickable links, as a flipbook, and can even view a map with pinpoints locations of where each event happened.

Steve Jobs Life and Career Timeline - Check out this Steve Jobs example. When visiting, use the buttons in the top left-had corner to change views.

Dipity Help - Visit this page to learn how to do everything with Dipity.


Intel: Museum of Me

Intel's "Museum of Me" enables you to create and explore a visual archive of your social life. It does not create a still infograph like most of the tools listed on this page. In contrast, it creates a video infographic based on the data it pulls from your Facebook account. This application is very simple and easy to use. You just need connect with Facebook at Intel’s Museum of Me application page where the application will automatically download all the content from your Facebook account and create your museum. The Museum of Me is ultimately an ad of Intel’s Core i5 processors. The app takes few mins of time to gather your data but after that it takes you to a lovely video tour of your own museum along with awesome background music. In the video you'll see random people standing around in the museum looking at your exhibits. The museum shows you the friends you interact with the most, photos you’ve uploaded, words you use most on your profile, and where your friends are from. It ends with a photo collage of your friends making up a photo of you. After creating the Museum, the application allows you to upload pictures of you Museum to your Facebook account. Unfortuantely there is no download option avaialble for the video you create. Alternatively, you can use screen capture software like Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 Screen Capture, Camtesia Studio, and so on. By using one of these screen capture programs, you can record your video while it’s playing.

Museum of Me: Amy Hissom-Daugherty Exhibition - Check out my museum that I recorded using Camtasia.


Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

Wolfram Alpha's Facebook analytics application enables you to gain insight on yourself and your social network. You can sign in for free and connect with Facebook and get unique, personalized information and analysis based on your social data.

Amy Hissom-Daugherty Personal Facebook Analytics - This is the analytics that was generated by Wolfram Alpha based on my Facebook data.