3 Awesome Online Infographic Design Generators

Infographics are a new form of business graphic that are fast becoming the latest content item to share via social media, to post in your blog or provide a visual graphic of data for a powerpoint presentation.  According to a recent study conducted by Emarketer,  many in-house marketers, as well as marketing agencies , are using infographics as part of their content marketing plans.

What are they?

Infographics are a graphic representation of data.  The buzz word is “data viz” short for data visualization. They are very similar to the business charts and graphs that are available on Microsoft Word, or Excel; however, that’s where the similarity ends.  They are usually much better designed and graphically more aesthetically pleasing.    There are many businesses and companies that are requesting these designs to educate their audience, build their brands and create awesome linkbait.

Tips for Graphic Designers

As a graphic designer, you should know by now that these graphics can be labor intensive design projects to plan, collect data and design.   You might want to check out these sites and see if these tools are products that you will be able to use to improve your design production. Or, perhaps you can use them to create an infographic, show off your design skills and share via social media.  I believe the free version of these software tools will have the company’s logo watermarked on the graphic but it seems a great tool to utilize to refine your design skills.  However, I would suggest that you use serious design tools like Photoshop for design projects provided to clients.  For further information, there is a lengthy but  great article, on Smashing Magazine that gives you plenty information about  The Do’s and Don’ts of Infographic Design if you are still puzzled as to what they are.

Tips for Business or Website Owners

As a business owner or website owner, you might want access to infographic tools to create simple business graphics for your presentations or that you can use to construct a design that your in-house designers can later refine.

Easel.ly

Awesome tool to create infographics online.

Infogram

It’s going to be tough choosing between which tool you want to use to create your designs.

Piktochart

Nifty tool with a great video demo available on Youtube.

Free Online QR Code Generator for Print Media Designs

There are many free QR Code generators online, offered by a variety of 2D barcode software vendors, but few offer functionality that enables a graphic designer to generate a QR code and make it readily available to be used on Photoshop or other graphic editing programs. This is important when designing or incorporating QR codes for print collateral or other small business marketing material

Multi-use QR Code Generator Website

Kerem Erkan’s online generator form does and it offers a whole slew of options.

With this handy online tool, you can generate a QR Code for all the following functions:

5 Top Sites for Free Vector Clip-Art and Illustrations

As a graphic designer, one needs to have a library of graphic elements from buttons, web graphics, icons to backgrounds.  If you are purchasing all your graphics,  building this library can get very expensive pretty quickly.  Here’s where the web has become a great resource for finding high quality, high resolution vector graphics for all your design projects.  They are usually created by other graphic designers and given away for free as a promotion and so website owners compile these free resources and make them available to you.

However, like anything else these freebie websites that provide free vector graphics vary in quality of content as well as graphics provided.  I have compiled some of the five best free websites.  They’re good because not only can you find top notch vector illustrations but they also  provide information such as the design company who authored them, the description of what you get in your downloadable file, the licensing arrangement and the file type, either .eps, .ai or .png and carefully organize and categorize their images.

Although this is not a comprehensive list, these five great sites should get you started.  You’ll feel like a kid in a candy store grabbing up all the goodies you can!  Of course, you’ll have to carve out some time in order to spend time searching, downloading and organizing all your new graphics!