To look at the concept of Information Design from a broad perspective and learn about cognitive load, you can read my article titled Information Design Guide: From Data Chaos to a Meaningful Whole before diving into the subject of Infographic Design.
That email has just landed in your inbox. Attached is a complex Excel spreadsheet consisting of 50 pages and hundreds of rows and columns. The request is usually always the same: “Let’s turn this into a stylish visual that can be understood at a single glance.” The first reflex of most designers is to panic or directly open Illustrator and start picking a color palette. This is exactly where the mistake begins. Trying to decorate data is not infographic design; it is merely putting makeup on data. True information architecture is the art of transforming that data into a navigation device in the user’s mind. Let’s look step-by-step at how you can transform those boring Excel tables into visuals that everyone can easily understand.
1- Understanding and Sorting the Data
The first and most ruthless step of the infographic design process is to understand the data and then weed out the redundancies. You don’t have to reflect every single piece of data you have into the design. Because the biggest enemy of an infographic is clutter. You should examine that massive pile of data before you like a sculptor looking at a block of marble. You need to chip away the excess to reveal the actual masterpiece. Before moving on to design, always ask yourself this question: “What truth should the reader realize after looking at this visual?”
If your goal is only to highlight the company’s profit increase in the last quarter, there is no logic in including all unnecessary expense items from the last five years in table. Leave only the numbers that serve your goals on the table. We previously discussed in detail in our Information Design Guide: From Data Chaos to a Meaningful Whole content that uninterpreted raw data only creates visual noise. Cut the noise and clarify the message.
2- Choosing the Right Graphic Model
After sorting the data, it’s time to match this message with the graphic model that the brain will process the fastest. The wrong graphic kills the right data. If you are showing a change over time, for example, the increasing number of users by month, our brain understands a line graph going upwards in seconds and without any difficulty. If you are comparing categories such as sales figures of different products, vertical bar charts are lifesavers.
Pie charts are very popular for explaining parts of a whole, but let’s share a little professional secret here. If you have more than four slices, definitely avoid pie charts. The human brain is truly terrible at comparing narrow angles that are close to each other. Instead, prefer treemap models that establish a proportion with the size of the boxes. Deliver the data to the center of the brain without straining the eyes.
3- Adding Functional Aesthetics to the Design
In this stage where we combine aesthetics with function, the rules are quite clear. The first rule is typography. Numbers and explanations must be readable within seconds. Therefore, completely abandon fancy, handwritten style, or very thin fonts. Turn to clean and sans-serif font families that are incredibly easy to read. The second rule is to use colors as an emphasis weapon. Never choose colors randomly. For example, design the entire graph in pale gray tones and pop only that single highest column you want to draw attention to with a vibrant color. This simple move locks the reader’s eye directly onto that target like a laser.
The final rule is not to be afraid of white space. Trying to squeeze an icon into every corner and a drawing into every gap will suffocate the design and make it harder to understand the data. At this point, use the Minimalism approach not just as an aesthetic preference, but as a functional tool that enables the reader to focus. Sometimes the best design is those empty spaces you haven’t touched at all.
4- Automating Processes
The final step is automation, which will take you from pixel-pushing to true professionalism. Designers who know their craft never draw those bars or proportions in graphics one by one by hand. Instead, they set up the system and hand it over to the programs. For simple projects, you can use the built-in graphic tools within design programs and paste the data directly into the program’s data screen. The program calculates the length of the bars mathematically perfectly for you.
For more complex tasks, plugins are used that pull data directly from an Excel or Google Sheets source. Data is an organism that is constantly living and changing. If you set the rules perfectly once, the infographic design rebuilds itself every time the data is updated. In this way, instead of doing the design from scratch in every quarterly report, you save hours by just updating the data.
Transition to Strategy
Complex tables or hundreds of pages of reports should no longer be intimidating for you. What is truly intimidating is approaching all this mass of information without a filtering strategy, hoping it just looks “nice.” When you incorporate a correct workflow into your daily routine, you move forever beyond being someone who just draws pretty pictures. You become a powerful storyteller who makes data speak, solves complexity, and shows people exactly what they need to understand. Now you know exactly what to do when you open that massive file.
