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Top 12 Tools You Can Use To Design

In today‘s world, infographics have become an extremely popular and powerful way to communicate messages, tell visual stories, present data, and showcase expertise. Studies consistently show that including infographics in your content can lead to increased website traffic, social media engagement, and backlinks.

But creating compelling, professional infographics requires having the right design tools at your fingertips. As an experienced design professional, I‘m often asked, "What are the best software programs for easily developing stunning infographics?"

In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll highlight the top 12 infographic maker platforms available today based on their capabilities, features, and ease of use. I‘ll provide detailed insights into the strengths of each tool, from Canva‘s simplicity to Adobe‘s advanced features.

I‘ll also outline key factors to evaluate when selecting the ideal infographic program for your specific needs and skill level. You‘ll learn tips to maximize your chosen software. Let‘s dive in!

The Growing Role of Infographics in Digital Marketing

First, let‘s look at a few statistics that highlight the exploding use of infographics in content marketing and digital communications:

  • 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster than text (3M Corporation)
  • Articles with infographics generate 650% more traffic than articles without (Hubspot)
  • Infographics are liked and shared on social media 3X more than other content (Convince & Convert)

It‘s clear visually representing information taps into our innate human affinity for visuals. Infographics simplify complex information, communicate key data, and showcase ideas in an engaging graphical format.

Leveraging infographics on your website blog, in social posts, and within presentations provides immense value for brands. As a marketing professional, you owe it to yourself to have infographic design tools readily available.

Let‘s look at the top options:

The 12 Best Infographic Design Tools

1. Canva – The User-Friendly Powerhouse

Canada has quickly become one of the most popular free graphic design tools for all skill levels. With its drag-and-drop interface and extensive library of templates, graphics, photos, and icons, anyone can create stunning designs regardless of experience.

For infographics, Canva offers beautifully designed templates for timelines, comparison charts, flowcharts, and more. Simply plug in your information and content, and customize the color schemes, fonts, and layouts to match your brand.

Canva makes infographic creation easy and approachable. It‘s fantastic for teams and companies that want to empower non-designers to produce their own visual content. While the basic version is free, I recommend considering the affordable "Pro" plan which unlocks more features.

2. Piktochart – Intuitive Infographic-Focused Tool

If infographics are your primary focus, Piktochart is purpose-built for that visual medium. The drag-and-drop editor is intuitive and easy to use, even for novices. Simply select a professionally designed template, customize with your text/data, add graphics and visuals, and export your infographic.

Compared to Canva, Piktochart provides more infographic-specific template designs focused on conveying data-driven narratives visually. But the overall approach is similar, making infographic creation accessible. Piktochart also offers great learning resources like design tips and examples.

3. Venngage – Trendy Themes and Assets

Venngage is another infographic-centric visual content tool filled with modern, stylish infographic templates across various categories like finance, health, timelines, guides, and more.

The infographic maker is very intuitive, enabling you to easily drag and drop icons, images, fonts, and other design assets onto templates that automatically resize. This allows endless easy customization to turn templates into unique designs.

Venngage is ideal for marketers who want a robust library of visually appealing infographic themes. It makes adding the graphics, colors, and fonts that bring dry data to life effortless.

4. Visme – Animated and Interactive

Visme differentiates itself by allowing users to not only design data-rich infographics but also animate elements and make them interactive. This added motion and interactivity takes infographics to the next level for greater engagement.

For example, you can have charts and graphs animate to showcase data trends. Interactive infographics allow viewers to click elements to reveal more information. Visme offers custom animation and transition options that make dry numbers and stats come alive.

Visme is also highly versatile, providing templates and assets to design presentations, banners, graphics, and more in addition to infographics. It‘s a robust marketing-focused visual content tool.

5. Adobe Creative Cloud – The Gold Standard for Pros

For professional designers who want maximum capabilities, Adobe Creative Cloud tools like Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop are the gold standard. These advanced programs offer industry-leading design features, endless customization, flawless collaboration between apps, and years of proven results.

Tools like Illustrator provide vector graphic design capabilities that allow limitless image scaling without quality loss – crucial for clear infographics. The Adobe ecosystem supports creating complex, multi-page infographic designs with ease.

Of course, leveraging Adobe software to its full potential takes strong design expertise. But for infographic pros, nothing beats Adobe Creative Cloud tools.

6. Infogram – Specialized for Data Visualization

What sets Infogram apart is its specialization in visualizing data and statistics in charts, graphs, maps, and more. It integrates directly with data sources like Excel, Google Sheets, RSS feeds, and Salesforce to auto-populate your designs with current numbers.

Infogram provides terrific visualization options to communicate trends and relationships in data. The reports and infographics dynamically reflect updates to the linked data sets.

For marketers with lots of statistics to present, Infogram helps create sleek, informative infographics efficiently. While the free plan has limited options, I recommend the Business plan for access to more features and capabilities.

7. Snappa – User-Friendly Free Infographics

Snappa is a wonderfully intuitive graphic design program with an emphasis on ease-of-use and speed. Unlike some other free tools that limit capabilities, Snappa‘s free plan includes all core features with unlimited downloads.

For straightforward infographic needs, Snappa allows you to customize free professionally designed templates or build your own from scratch using its image editor and elements. The image library helps create eye-catching infographics.

Snappa is beginner-friendly but can also meet the needs of experienced designers. The free plan makes it easy for teams and companies to start creating infographics at no cost.

8. Biteable – Make Infographics Move

Most infographic tools focus on static designs, but Biteable takes infographics animated by creating animated videos. It provides professionally designed infographic templates tailored specifically for information and data communication.

Animated infographic videos increase engagement and information retention compared to static images. With Biteable, you can turn flat infographics into short, impactful videos that bring critical data to life. Make key stats pop through motion.

9. Adobe Spark – Streamlined Creativity

Adobe Spark provides a simplified graphic design experience than flagship programs like Photoshop or Illustrator. The browser-based Spark lets anyone easily create social graphics, web pages, and videos in minutes.

For infographics, Adobe Spark offers numerous professionally designed templates covering styles from minimalist to bold. Easily customize the templates by tweaking text, visuals, colors, and layouts to create beautiful infographics that perfectly convey your story and stats.

While more constrained than Illustrator, Spark enables graphic creation with no learning curve. It‘s a great entry-level Adobe design tool.

10. PicMonkey – Intuitive Image and Graphics Editor

While not solely an infographic tool, PicMonkey offers intuitive, versatile graphic design capabilities. It provides preset templates, fonts, graphics, and color schemes that make it easy to design infographics or edit/enhance photos and images.

PicMonkey is very user-friendly for beginners but also offers advanced editing features through its customizable UI. Designing infographics from scratch or customizing templates is made seamless.

The software also smoothly integrates with Canva, enabling you to bring creations from both tools together seamlessly in your designs. PicMonkey is affordable yet highly capable.

11. InDesign – Powerful Multi-Page Infographics

For marketers who need to create intricate infographics across multiple pages, like research reports, InDesign provides sophisticated page layout tools that go beyond single-page designs.

InDesign offers masterful typographic controls, streamlined collaboration across teams, and seamless integration with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat. For multipage infographic projects, InDesign is unmatched in its capabilities.

Of course, expect a steeper learning curve than simpler tools. But design professionals who master InDesign can craft visually stunning infographics and publications.

12. Venngage Infographics

As a specialized infographic design platform, Venngage makes it easy for businesses to create sleek, professional infographics through its broad selection of templates, themes, and graphic assets.

The software has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that allows you to populate infographic templates with your text, images, logos and data. Features like auto-resize make it a breeze to customize templates for branding and messaging.

Ideal for teams without dedicated designers, Venngage enables you to generate on-brand infographics for sales materials, social posts, blog articles, and more to drive engagement.

Key Factors for Selecting Infographic Tools

With this extensive list of top-tier infographic design platforms, how do you determine the ideal software based on your specific needs and skill level? Here are key factors to consider:

– Learning curve – Assess your current design expertise. Options like Canva, PicMonkey, and Snappa are exceptionally user-friendly for beginners, while tools like Adobe‘s need design experience.

– Budget – Pricing ranges from free entry-level options to hundreds per year for robust paid platforms. Weigh available features vs. costs.

– Templates – Pre-made professionally designed templates jumpstart your creative process. Look for an abundance of template choices.

– Customization – Your infographics need to stand out, so easy customization is crucial. Ensure fonts, colors, and design elements can be modified.

– Assets – The best tools offer vast libraries of photos, illustrations, icons, charts, and design assets to accelerate creation.

– Output options – You‘ll want to export your infographics in multiple file types and sizes for different uses. Look for versatile output capabilities.

The ideal combinations depend on your goals. For example, using Canva for its ease of use and Venngage for the infographic-specific templates is a powerful pairing.

Novice users may stick to easier tools like Snappa initially, then graduate to more advanced platforms over time as skills improve. Leverage free trials to test tools before purchasing.

Infographics Are Now Easier Than Ever

Today‘s infographic software options make designing stunning, professional infographics achievable for everyone. What used to require hours of complex work using illustration and design platforms is now possible in minutes.

The templates, intuitive editors, vast creative assets, and handy features of these tools empower you to turn raw data into compelling graphical narratives. Infographics can now convey ideas, map processes, visualize statistics, educate audiences, and showcase expertise with ease.

So if you‘re looking to boost engagement, storytelling, and thought leadership through long-form visual content, consider adding infographics to your marketing mix with the help of these powerful creation tools. Start designing!

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Michael

Michael Reddy is a tech enthusiast, entertainment buff, and avid traveler who loves exploring Linux and sharing unique insights with readers.