Laying out your infographic design

- While page two of your wireframe should show the layout of your design, you may not want to build the entire layout within that page to start. Instead, you might choose to create a fifth art board, one that's sized at 1,000 pixels wide, which is the standard width for a long scroll infographic. This will help you create your layout to scale, which makes it easier for most, including myself. Now, if you're working from one screen instead of two, you may want to take the final research and paste it off your art board for ease of reference. Since the text of the final research should be original word for word copy for your infographic, this will also make it easier to copy and paste that text directly into your wireframe. Now where you start with your layout is entirely up to you. Some designers prefer to first lay out all of the text in the infographic. When you lay out your text up front, you can better determine how the rest of your visual elements will fit within the content. This also starts to give you an idea of the areas within the design that may be too text heavy and should be broken up or visualized further. Other designers prefer to start at the top and work their way down. I, for example, am starting by laying out the typography for the title. This helps me get a gut check on my font choices, while also establishing a column-based layout in the design. As you lay out your design, it will be important to identify each illustration and icon that you want to include throughout. This can be a very time consuming task, but will also save you a lot of time during the design phase. Doing this work up front also gives you an opportunity to pressure test your ideas with your end stakeholders. Now, if you're working with a variety of clients and brands, rather than one brand all the time, this step becomes even more important. You'd be surprised to learn how different brands restrict different types of imagery. And you don't really know it until you present a wireframe to them. As you identify iconography and illustrations to use throughout your design, take the time to truly consider what visual elements will stand out and exemplify the content without having to read the accompanying text. Now don't beat yourself up if you can't do this for every single visual. Instead, set a goal of including at least one strong illustrated scene that will engage the audience and deliver a sense of topic or takeaways for every 250 pixels of length or so within your design. For this infographic, I've decided to use a visual metaphor throughout the design. Visual metaphors are a great way of hooking your audience while communicating a key theme in the design. In this case, rather than relying on a vertical timeline like I did in the 2010 version of this design, I've decided to create a visual background of an assembly line with each key moment in the history of creating E-commerce acting as an item on that assembly line that will eventually lead directly to the world of E-commerce. When showing a visual metaphor as a background, it's best to sketch some of that out for your stakeholders to see. It's hard to explain visual metaphors and far easier to show them, but this doesn't mean that you should sketch out every element of the infographic. The goal of the wireframe is to present your best direction to all stakeholders and get their feedback. Don't put yourself and your stakeholders in the position of having to rework elements that they haven't yet approved. Instead, create placeholders for the illustrations and use the graphics key to provide a detailed description of each illustration for approval first. Take the time to consider how each design element will better inform the audience and represent the information at hand. By making these decisions before you start design, you'll be able to consider how each element works together for the overall composition, as well as ensuring alignment with stakeholders well in advance of design.