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20+ Tools to Create Your Own Infographics

A picture is worth a thousand words – based on this, infographics would carry hundreds of thousands of words, yet if you let a reader choose between a full-length 1000-word article and an infographic that needs a few scroll-downs, they'd probably prefer absorbing information straight from the infographic. What's not to like? Colored charts and illustrations deliver connections better than tables and figures and as users spend time looking back and forth the full infographic, they stay on the site longer. Plus, readers who like what they see are more likely to share visual guides more than articles.

While not everyone can make infographics from scratch, there are tools available on the Web that will help you create your very own infographics. In this article, we're listing more than 20 such options to help you get your messages across to your readers, visually.

Read Also: The Infographic Revolution: Where Do We Go From Here?

What About Me?

"What About Me?" is a personalization tool that produces colorful infographics that display your social media habits automatically from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The tool is provided by Intel. Create an infographic of your digital life and become inspired by the people you know, the things you see, and the experiences you have online.

Vizualize.me

Vizualize.me allows you to create an online resume format that is beautiful, relevant and fun, all with just one click. It enables you to express your professional accomplishments in a simple yet compelling personal visualization, and will help optimize your LinkedIn Profile to get a kickass Visual Resume.

Piktochart

With Piktochart, you get to create an innovative Infographic using a combination of different types of visualizations: themes, icons, vectors, images and chart exporter. Drag-and-drop and click your way through color schemes, shapes and fonts, then export the materials as static or html to easily embed it for use at your site.

easel.ly

Easel.ly is a fun tool to create your Infographics with drag and drop features and a simple interface. You can easily create and share visual ideas online, supported by 'vhemes' or visual themes that help you get started from the preset Infograpic style. Drag and drop a 'vheme' onto your canvas to turn your idea into a full infographic.

Visual.ly

Visually helps you customize infographics in seconds, and no, you don't have to be an analyst or designer to make infographics with Visually Create. Visual.ly allows you to also discover infographics and favorites from other users.

Infogr.am

Infogr.am is a simple yet most exciting way to create static and interactive infographics. Import raw data to Infogr.am, and the site's online tool will help you turn that data into a nice looking chart or full-blown infographic in minutes.

Many Eyes

Many Eyes is an experiment by IBM Research and the IBM Cognos software group with a simple belief: 'Finding the right way to view your data is as much an art as a science'. Many Eyes provides a range of visualizations from the ordinary to the experimental, where each can be put together with a click.

Venngage

Venngage is an online infographics tool that helps you create and publish custom infographics, and at the same time, engage viewers and track results. Venngage allows you to create beautiful infographics for blogs and websites and you can also watch the numbers of your audience grow with compelling and beautiful content.

iCharts

With iCharts, you can create great-looking charts in minutes with interactive and easy-to-share data. iCharts makes it easy to visualize, share and distribute big and small data.

Dipity

Dipity is a free digital timeline website, if you are looking for a different type of Infographics. The mission is to organize the web's content by date and time. Dipity is the fastest and easiest way to bring history to life with stunning multimedia timelines.

Timeline JS

TimelineJS is a beautifully crafted timeline that is easy and intuitive to use. You can pull in media from different sources with built-in support for Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and more.

StatSilk

StatSilk offers web-based and desktop software to make data analysis easy, efficient and enjoyable, to cater to diverse mapping and visualisation needs.

InFoto Free

InFoto Free is an app for your Android to create an infographic of your photo-taking habits, using a Photo stats analyzer. With InFoto Free you can create awesome looking high-res infographics from your photo collection. It tells you things like what time of the day you prefer to take photos in, whether you prefer horizontal or vertical orientations as well as your favorite city to shoot in.

Photo Stats

Photo Stats is an iPhone app that analyses the photos you take on your iPhone. The app generates cool and stylish infographics that shows how, when and where you take your photos from. You get to easily visualize your photo-taking habits and share it with friends.

More Tools

1. ChartsBin – An online tool to create your own interactive map instantly with no installation or coding needed, and you can embed the map in your own website or blog easily too.

2. Tableau Public – A free application for your Windows computer that brings data to life. You can create and share interactive charts and graphs, stunning maps, live dashboards and fun applications in minutes. Anyone can do it, it's that easy.

3. Creately – Want to create beautiful diagrams in no time? Creately may be a good choice to use as it can be used across all sectors by individuals, corporate teams, developers, software architects, students and teachers alike for diagramming purposes.

4. Gliffy – Gliffy helps to easily create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more. You can easily drag-and-drop your way through the makings of an infographic using the many shapes from an extensive library.

5. SIMILE Widgets – SIMILE is a free and open-source data visualization Web widget.

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

7. Wordle – Wordle is a simple web app for generating "word clouds" from the text you provide. While the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text, you can also tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Related posts:

1. 13 Infographics To Understand The Blogosphere Better
2. Infographics for Web Designers: Information You Ought to Know
3. 55 Interesting Social Media Infographics
4. The State of IT Security [Infographic]

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Online Tool Crops your Images “Intelligently”

The interesting parts of an image are preserved in the cropped version

Cropp is new online tool that will intelligently crop and/or resize your images in the browser without requiring any software. You can use the tool to crop a single picture or upload multiple images (max 5) and it will crop /resize them all to the desired sizes in a batch.

This is obviously a crowded field – search for "crop resize images" in Google and you'll find dozens of similar web apps that do cropping and much more –  but there are few unique features in Cropp that you'll probably like.

Many-to-Many Cropping

One, Cropp is probably the only online app that does many-to-many cropping – you can upload multiple pictures, select multiple outputs sizes and it will provide you all the cropped versions in a downloadable zip file.

The other advantage is that Cropp algorithms will automatically try to preserve the most interesting parts of a picture in the cropped version (handy when you are trying to create small thumbnails). And if you aren't happy with the final output, you can always adjust the crop marquee manually to get the desired result.

See some more useful websites.

This story, Online Tool Crops your Images "Intelligently", was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 11/06/2012 under Image Editing, Websites, Internet.

Related posts:

1. Pull Images from any Web Page and Turn Them Into a Nice Photo Collage Online
2. Zoho Online Database and Reporting Tool
3. Optimize Image Sizes Online With Yahoo's Smushit
4. SEO Tips for Google Images
5. Resize Text in Firefox Without Resizing the Images

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A Master List of 500 Free Courses From Great Universities

During the past two days, our list of Free Online Movies has been getting some good exposure. And we've got no complaints. But while assembling the movie list, we were also busy putting together a list of 500 Free Online Courses from top universities. Here's the lowdown: This master list lets you download free courses from schools like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Harvard and UC Berkeley. Generally, the courses can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or university web sites. Right now you'll find 55 courses in Philosophy, 50 in History, 50 in Computer Science, 35 in Physics, and that's just beginning to scratch the surface. Most of the courses were recently produced. But, in some cases, we've layered in lecture series by famous intellectuals recorded years ago. Here are some highlights from the complete list.

• African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle – YouTube– iTunes – Clay Carson, Stanford
• Financial Markets 2011 - YouTube - iTunes - Web Site – Robert Shiller, Yale
• Growing Up in the Universe – YouTube – Richard Dawkins, Oxford
• Human Behavioral Biology – iTunes Video – YouTube – Robert Sapolsky, Stanford
• Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) – Download Course – Christine Hayes, Yale.
• Heidegger's Being & Time – iTunes - Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley
• Intensive Introduction to Computer Science Using C, PHP, and JavaScript – Multiple Formats – iTunes – David Malan, Harvard
• Introduction to Cosmology and Particle Physics – YouTube – Sean Carroll, Caltech
• Invitation to World Literature – Web Site - David Damrosch, Harvard
• iPhone Application Development in iOS5 - HD Video iTunes - Standard-Def Video iTunes - Paul Hegarty, Stanford
• Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? – YouTube - Web Site- Michael Sandel, Harvard
• Philosophy of Language – iTunes – John Searle, UC Berkeley
• Physics for Future Presidents – YouTube – Richard Muller, UC Berkeley
• Quantum Electrodynamics – Web Site - Richard Feynman, Presented at University of Auckland
• Science, Magic and Religion - iTunes - YouTube – Courtenay Raiai, UCLA
• The American Novel Since 1945 – YouTube – iTunes Audio – iTunes Video - Download Course – Amy Hungerford, Yale
• The Art of Living – Web Site – Team taught, Stanford

Visit this list of Free Courses for many more hours of free enrichment. Separately, you might also want to check out our collection of Free Language Lessons. It offers free lessons in over 40 languages.

A Master List of 500 Free Courses From Great Universities is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

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Self-Service Custom Infographics (@visually) in education

Like Infographics (I do), then you might like to try out Visual.ly, a tool that enables you to create your own (basic) infographic quickly and easily.

As reported on Mashable this week:

"The tool will eventually use APIs from sources including ESPN, the Economist and social media sites to compile and create data visualizations. At its launch, the startup is offering templates that use the Facebook or Twitter API."

How great is this – use a one-stop tool to generate an information resources for use in learning materials? OK, it is a little basic at the moment, and you'll need to be clever about how you input the details of information, hashtag, etc but you can get some good results, using the standard templates provided.

I see this as something that could grow into a valuable classroom resource, whether it is something we use to create and generate for the students to use or discuss, or something the students can use to generate work for a classroom activity, discussion, etc. how do you use infographics, and do you see this as something that you would use (if so, how?)

Here are a couple I created earlier (click to enlarge):

Visual.ly infographic for @hopkinsdavid

Visual.ly infographic comparing the Twitter accounts of The Eden Project and National Trust

However, be warned. I have not found it easy to create these, nor was it straight forward at all. On many occasions the infographic simply did not work, I was not able to download or embed it, I kept having new windows popping up all over the place, I was logged out countless times, and it is only through sheer determination that I continued and got these two above done – I would normally have given up long before now! I am sure the service will improve … ?

Related posts:

1. Social Media and Social Network Educational Infographics
2. Infographic: The Social Landscape
3. Social Media in Universities (Infographic)

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Fast and slow visualization

James Cheshire ponders the difference between fast and slow thinking maps, and the dying breed of the latter.

So do the renowned folks at the NY Times Graphics Dept. prefer fast or slow thinking visualisations? I asked them what they think makes a successful map. Archie Tse said what I hoped he would: the best maps readable, or interpretable, at a number of levels. They grab interest from across the room and offer the headlines before drawing the viewer ever closer to reveal intricate detail. I think of these as rare visualisations for fast and slow thinking. The impact of such excellent maps is manifest by the popularity of atlases and why they inspire so many to become cartographers and/or travel the world.

A graphic that takes a little while to understand doesn't always mean it was a failure in design. It might mean that the underlying data is hard to understand. Likewise, a graphic that isn't what you expect might let you answer different questions than from the usual standby.

[Spatial Analysis]

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