Friday Freebies for your Blog: Create your own Infographics with Tableau Public

By Tom Collins

Another hot topic for online publishers (that’s what we bloggers are, right?) is using infographics to make complex information more accessible. Tableau Public aims its free data visualization tool directly at bloggers.

I haven’t had a chance to play with it, so I’m hoping some of you will — and share your experiences and results. Just try it out, post examples on your blogs, and then leave a comment below with a link to your post(s).

If you haven’t done anything with infographics yet, here are some examples and resources:

Examples

Infographics as press releases: 3 beautiful examples – Ragan’s PR Daily

12 Critical Elements Every Homepage Must Have [Infographic] – Hubspot

Resources

Making an infographic that serves the main goal of clarifying complex information requires more than just nifty tools. It’s communication, after all. So it’s very much like thinking that a powerful word processer is all you need to write well.

But that shouldn’t stop you from getting started. The only way to learn to write well is, well, write. As Jacques Barzun teaches in Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, “All Good Writing is Self-Taught.” Same goes for visual communication via infographics.

In addition, with design work there’s an interplay between knowing what you want to say and what kinds of visual tools you have in your toolbox.

So get going. That’s the only way to develop your visual communication skills. And here are some resources to give you an awareness of the design issues you’ll want to work on over time.

How to Design Your Own Infographics – Queness (scroll down the the Best Practice Process section)

The Do’s And Don’ts Of Infographic Design – Smashing Magazine

The Do’s And Don’ts Of Infographic Design: Revisited – Smashing Magazine (these two articles include some great points and are not as conflicting as the second one makes it seem)

Anything by Edward Tufte – the ULTIMATE resource on information design.

Can’t wait to see what you do with this one!