Creating an Infographic

Enthused by my research into the infographic as a communication tool within education, I planned to create an infographic that I could use as part of my work, teaching young photography.

My choice of style was influenced by the demographic of my students, between 14 and 22, outside of education with varying degrees of photographic experience. I planned a simple infographic to explain the rules of the exposure triangle to supplement my teaching. I wanted it to be engaging, so I planned to use bright colours and a casual style.

To create the infographic I found the application Canva.    Canva is a user-friendly design tool that makes graphic design for users with all levels of abilities, from beginners upwards. It employs a drag-and-drop interface to select and place images, graphics, photographs, and text boxes from a library of predefined objects onto a background. Canva provides lots of pre-designed templates for those who want to speed up their design process.  For my design, I decided to start with a blank document and build an infographic from the ground up, and I found the interface incredibly simple to use.

I used an Instagram-sized background, from the selection of pre-defined sizes, which gave me the option to publish the finished item onto Instagram, should I choose to. I found the hardest part of using Canva to be my level of creativity, I am not a graphic designer and was tasked with building something that looked right I soon realised that it was not as straightforward as I might have thought.

A library of stock items and tools allowed for GIFs to be embedded into the page with flexible animation options. Some of the tools had a familiar feel to them, such as the drawing tools which appear to be similar to those used on many applications. The selection tools enabled several stock items to be grouped together and then moved and resized as one. They could then be un-grouped should the need arise to re-edit a part of the design.

Canva provided publishing tools, found under the share button, to publish the final piece to a range of social media accounts as well as to download to a hard disk drive. You are also able to choose a range of formats for the final piece, I chose to save it as both a move file (MP4) and a GIF because it had moving elements in it that I wanted to keep. The MP4 did not work well, but the GIF performed well and with its automatic loop feature it continued to keep the embedded GIF elements moving.

Canva is free to download and use, or use through your browser, and has a subscription model if you want access to its entire library of objects.  More details are available from https://www.canva.com/ 

I am very happy with the result of my first infographic and I enjoyed using Canva to create it. I will use Canva again in the future, to add to my photographic teaching tools, but the final word will come from my students, whose opinions I will canvas this evening.