Infographic is a great tool to deliver your message visually and in fewer words. While there are a
The reason to bring this post to is that chances are that not each one of you may have Adobe or Corel apps. But you would have MS-Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) on your machine.
To begin creating an Infographic, you first need to know, in what medium will it be delivered to the audience. Is it online or on paper? If it is the later, you will have to restrict it to A4 or Letter size. You will run into challenges with Printing (quality issue), if you try to do so.
Ok, so let’s begin with creating a canvas for the Infographic.
- Go to the “Design” menu and click the “Custom Slide Size…” option
- Enter “720 px” and “960” px in the Width and Height field respectively
- PowerPoint automatically converts into its native Windows metric units. In my case… “7.5 in” and “10 in”
NOTE: What you find here is that PowerPoint has a default resolution of 96
- In case you do a “Save As” in JPG format, you will get a file with Dimension as 720 x 960
- With the canvas size ready, we now look at the various resources that we can use to build
our Infographic
Infographic, in general, have the following basic elements
- Pictures
- Vector Artwork
- Graphs
- Icons
and Fonts
Pictures: You could use your own pictures or can download/buy high-resolution pictures from Stock Photography sites. No matter what you choose to do, it’s important to convert the picture files into 96
Vectors: If you are good in design and drawing, you could use a CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape to create an artwork. Or alternatively, download/buy from a Stock library. Most probably, you will receive the downloads in AI or EPS file format. Edit these vectors and remove the gradient layers, because they don”t import well into PPT. Then save the vector files as EMF (Enhanced MetaFile) format. Go to “Insert” menu and import the EMF file using the “Pictures” option. Ungroup the image, by right-clicking, a couple of times, until the file breaks down to its basic elements of images and vector items. You will also get a large background image with a bounding box. You may remove all image items and just keep vectors for your artwork.
Graphs: MS-Excel is preferred choice here to build various Graphs, based on your data.
Icons:
Fonts:
Note:
Next, we look at the features of PowerPoint that assist in creating the form and factor of the Infographic.
- Rulers, Gridlines and Guides: Go to the “View” menu and click on the Ruler, Gridlines and Guides check box. Then go to Show “Grid Settings” and modify the Spacings. In order to add Vertical or Horizontal Guides, right-click on the canvas and choose the sub-options from the flyout menu.
- The color of Canvas/Background: Right-click on the canvas and then click on the “Format Background” option from the flyout menu. In the fly-in Attributes panel on the right, pick a desired “Color” as a “Solid Fill”.
