Visual Content Marketing

Solution: Information Design

• Graphic Design vs. Information Design
• Illustration vs. Information Design
• Technical Communication vs. Information Design
• Copywriting and Stock Photo Sourcing
• So How Is Information Design Different?
• The Ingredients of Information Design
• Pencil Sketch: Driving Visual Ideation

Graphic Design Vs. Information Design

Most of us in the business communication fields have some graphic design chops or have leveraged the craft for communication projects. The graphic designer is typically challenged to come up with a layout in a pre-designated format leveraging static copy and images against a client's pre-approved branding guidelines or come up with those branding guidelines organically. The information designer does not take the data and the tables and the content as a pre-existing static unit cast in stone, but thinks about how to structure it in terms of hierarchies and display it and possibly replace or supplement data and charts with visuals. Perhaps a dense concept might be unpacked with a new infographic.

In earlier years, I personally went through the growing pains of trying to leverage graphic design resources to come up with an infographic type visual for a solution offering before the term “infographics” became popular. My graphic design resources were challenged on a few different fronts, and it became a pattern for me. First, they were not illustrators, so they were not going to pencil sketch a new conceptual visual to steer the piece, nor ...