INFOGRAPHICS & WORD CLOUDS – EDUCATING, ENTERTAINING, & ENGAGING AUDIENCES

The Art of communication is an ever-evolving skill. Its wide-ranging art form aims to share information. One of the key points is to know and understand the group that you are wanting to share information with.  We work with diverse groups across the globe and we adapt how we communicate to feedback and report back to the group we work with. Some of the ways within our work we report back to different groups is through monthly progress reports to clients, community and focus groups summaries, evaluations, literature reviews, tables, and graphs. 

Infographics are becoming increasingly popular as a form of reporting back to people. Since infographics exploded onto the graphic design scene, they have become a staple for communication in classrooms, in the workplace, and across the web. An infographic is a collection of imagery, charts, and minimal text that gives an easy-to-understand overview of a topic.

If we turn back the hands of time we are reminded of the cavemen days and hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt that represented letters, words and full sentences with images alone. The 19th century pie charts, graphs and even 3-D visuals were popular in newspapers, and in political campaigns to represent lots of information. As the use of images and icons evolve, today we can use infographics to educate, entertain and engage an audience.

Word clouds are also another way to share information in a creative way. They are graphical representations of word frequency that give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in a source text. The larger the word in the visual the more common the word used. This is a useful tool when sharing findings of an evaluation.

Do not fear, the traditional report writing of line by line of text, bullet points, very few graphics and the rest will still hold a place in sharing information. Luckily for Kāhui Tautoko we draw on the collective strengths of one another, and we are fortunate to have some creative colleagues who have the patience and ability to generate ideas to relay information in the form of infographics.