INFOGRAPHICS

I think I’m going to love infographics! I have been doing something similar using Microsoft Publisher and Word. Using a program that has everything right there to use as well as templates will be awesome! I played around with three different sites to see which one I liked the best: easel.ly, piktochart, and infogr.am. All three do what you need but some are better than the others.

Easel.ly

The first site I gave the once over was easel.ly (https://easel.ly). When you first get to the easel.ly site, you are greeted with a ton of infographic templates to choose from.  I was excited because they were so creative and I could just plug my information in and WHAM- I have a great infographic. The thing I did not like about it was that with the free version, you are very limited on the graphics and icons you can you. To be able to choose the ones I wanted, I would have had to pay to upgrade.   If you want to pay, Infogr.am is the cheapest of the sites to choose from at $36 dollars or $3 per month. Once you go Pro, you get a ton of templates, 50 fonts to choose from, design help, and you can upload your own fonts and company logos. Since I don’t make infographics very often, I would probably just stick with the freebie.

Piktochart

The second site I visited was piktochart (piktochart.com).  Piktochart was easy to use and has many free and premium templates.  You can filter the templates out to just see the free ones.  There are 10 free templates to choose from or an option to create your own. They aren’t as creative as easel.ly, but there are hundreds of icons and photos to choose from as well as many fonts that you don’t have to pay for.  I made a piktochart for this assignment and felt like there wasn’t anything I needed to do that I couldn’t as a free member.  To upgrade, it’s called Leveling Up and it would cost about $39.00 dollars a year- not that much more than easel.ly.   Some pluses to “Leveling Up” are the amount of storage space you get: 400 MB of storage with an unlimited amount of image and file uploads.  Also you can download the piktocharts in high-resolution or as a pdf.

 Infogr.am

The last site I reviewed was infogr.am (https://infogr.am).  In my opinion, it is very  similar to the other two, but the free templates are very plain. You would have to be creative to make it eye catching or colorful. It was easy to use, once you realize how to navigate the site and the information. They have many types of charts to choose from, but not many photos or icons, which was a turn off to me.   

The free version of infogr.am is extremely simple and basic.  There are a lot added if you decide to go with a paid membership, but they are also the most expensive of all three sites – $19 per month for a pro membership and $67 a month for a business membership.  Both of these upgrades provide pdf and printing options, privacy capabilities, multiple user collaboration, unlimited icons, more themes and templates as well as more storage space.  Since I like doing things free- I didn’t care for this site very much. It didn’t offer enough things that I’d like to use on my pages.

Overall, I really like easel.ly and piktochart and will continue to use them on a free account. I made an inforgraphic with piktochart using data from article I found on the Pew Research Center website (http://www.pewresearch.org/).

Barthel, M., Mitchell, A., & Holcomb, J. (2016, December 15). Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion. Retrieved March 1, 2017, from http://www.journalism.org/2016/12/15/many-americans-believe-fake-news-is-sowing-confusion/