In less obvious cases, I work from the hierarchy below to see if they pass the test.

I created this specifically for infographics, which is the medium we work in most — but it may apply to other design disciplines as well. As a designer becomes more skilled, they progress up this pyramid, usually – but not always – in this order. Let’s go through these skills one by one.

Color

The effective use of color is one of the most basic skills to learn. An inappropriate use of color is the largest and most immediate red flag I spot. Do the pallets fit the mood and tone of the content? Are the colors overly muted, too contrasted, or just off? These are some of most common mistakes I find.

Space

The use of space is very important for infographics, as there is a lot of information to convey with limited real estate. The first mistakes I look for are the overcrowding of elements and not letting them breathe. Then I look for the use or non-use of white space. Efficiency of space is important in an infographic, but if it’s too dense, the viewer will find it off-putting.

Typography

Effectively working with type is a skill that can take a long time to master, but an understanding of the basics is required for any successful design. Choosing the right font will only get you so far. Appropriate weighting, leading, and tracking should be applied every time. Kern those headlines, too.

Customization

You would be surprised how far a designer can get with stock images and icons. But to take it to the next level, a designer should be able to transform or create new graphics. This certainly includes traditional skills like illustration, but also modern skills like Photoshopping. I personally can draw slightly better than my five year old, but I can certainly create anything in my mind’s eye using Photoshop. This skill, above others, takes lots and lots of practice and there are no shortcuts. A high degree of customization skill will provide you a near infinite tool box.

Creativity

Being really creative involves having the design say more than merely the pixels on the screen or paper. Creative design makes connections between elements, ideas, and concepts that have not been thought of by the client, or the viewer. It often involves asking yourself, “Is this the best way to represent this?” and “How can I say more, without adding more”.

Storytelling

Many of the projects in the Visually Marketplace have a journalist assigned to them, to craft the story. But the final product is always more unified when the designer is also a storyteller. This doesn’t mean they create the story, but design is a language, and a collection of pretty words does not make an interesting book. Successful designer-storytellers pay attention to the evolving tone of the narrative and incorporate that into their work. The client may be too close to the subject matter to be objective, and so the designer needs to use the right tone, structure and imagery to guide the audience through the graphic effectively.

Versatility

If you have got a handle on all of the above (or below), then consider yourself a very good designer. Now, master being able to bring those skills to a wildly diverse range of styles, and you will be an invaluable designer. Specialization is good, but can be limiting, especially in a freelance world where clients can come from all walks of life. Can you create something that is minimal and clean? Loud and audacious? Suitable for a 19th century antique book seller? Or a 21st century aerospace company?

Every designer has their own preferences, but it’s good to get outside your comfort zone. Force yourself if you have to. I cut my teeth in design doing concert posters for a local music venue. I did one for every band that came in the door, whether they were death metal, experimental noise, traditional singer-songwriters, or hippie jam bands. Hundreds of posters later, I have picked up a deep collection of tips, tricks, and ideas that affect my personal preferences.

You do not need to master the entire hierarchy to become a certified designer in the Visually Marketplace. A firm grasp of the first three and a foothold in the others is enough to be successful here. So if you think you have what it takes, let us know by applying to our marketplace. But first, upload your best infographic work to your profile. We can’t wait to see it.

Jess Bachman is the Creative Director at Visually.

The secret is simple. Be incredibly lucky.

Luck is the third piece of the virality triumvirate and obviously the hardest to bank on. In fact, you cannot achieve true virality without it. With great content and powerful tactics you can certainly get millions of views on a consistent basis, but if lady luck doesn’t give her blessing, you will end up with a good – but not great – ROI.

So let’s take a look at these three puzzle pieces and see how they fit together so you know where to put your efforts.

There are different levels of viral success, from a few thousand views to Gangnam Style. It’s important to understand what you can reasonably achieve with the right amount of effort and to set your expectations accordingly. The chart below outlines what you need in order to achieve consistent results. Consistency is important because virality is, by nature, all about the outliers — and you can’t set expectations on outliers.

Tactics

To get any type of fire going on a consistent basis, you need the right tools and expertise. The most important is your platform. You just put up some content that you think will do well, how many eyeballs can you access to jump start the viral loop? This can be YouTube subscribers, Twitter followers, blog and newsletter subscribers, and main website traffic.

CollegeHumor has a huge YouTube platform of almost 4 million subscribers. This alone is enough to get the first 100,000 views on their videos inside of a day. This huge subscriber count is an outlier and would push the slopes of the above chart to the right, but it still does not guarantee virality. Their content is consistently funny and well produced and they have vaulted 16 videos above 10 million views. However, their total uploads number 1,900, making 10 million views a 100-to-one shot. You can’t escape the luck factor.

If you are looking to create dozens of videos with over a million views, then at the very minimum, you need a platform of this magnitude.

What if you have no platform? No YouTube subscribers, no audience, no tribe? Then you are like most people and everyone starting out. There is no roadmap of what to do here other than hustle and be smart. Social voting sites like Reddit and HackerNews will allow great content to flourish… some of the time. Sometimes, the very best content will get lost in the noise and never be heard from again, or it will resurface a week or a month later as the biggest thing ever. Trying to make sense of this will drive you mad.

The lucky outliers will destroy your expectations

Remember Rebecca Black? Her Friday video has topped anything by College Humor and her 33 total uploads have netted her 244,000 YouTube subscribers: a very respectable platform. But her Friday video was an outlier and with the absence of any real platofrm power (at the time), and questionable content, pulled in 48 million views. The obvious major factor here was just luck. She has done six music videos since, each receiving fewer views that the previous, with the latest one receiving 1.2 million views.

So if you do achieve some viral success and want to replicate it, take a hard look at the factors that lead to your virality. If it does look like luck was a major factor, then avoid a strategy that includes “winning the lottery twice.”

Even if you think your content is great, do not be seduced by outliers. The video from DollarShaveClub is hilarious and with a minimal platform would be enough to get to 100,000 views. But 10 million? That requires a substantial amount of luck and it’s likely they will not repeat that level of success even with better content. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try, as 100k views can still provide an exceptional ROI.
 
Jess Bachman is a Creative Director at Visual.ly. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image: Shutterstock

Part of my role as Creative Director at Visual.ly is to evaluate infographic designer candidates and make sure the best are members of our Marketplace. Mostly, this involves reviewing around 20 to 100 portfolios per week. After looking at thousands of portfolios this year, I have come up with somes tips for designers to stick to if they are looking to get the attention of a creative director.

Your own domain vs hosted portfoio sites

Having your own domain and website is an opportunity and a risk. It allows you to immediately show off any website design skills you may have and this should be required for website designers. It isn’t needed for illustrators and other designers, but can still be an opportunity to show off your creativity.

My process when reviewing hosted portfolios is pretty automatic and routine. Stumbling onto a really well done personal website can immediately peak my attention.

The risk, however, is that most personal websites I’ve seen are not well done.

Regardless of your abilities or client references, it often is hard to get past a dated, sloppy, or out-of-touch site design. Remember: if you are applying for an open position, you can assume many more are applying as well, and the reviewer or creative director often has seconds to make a gut decision.

If you can’t put together a well crafted personal site, just direct me to a hosted portfolio.

Not all hosted portfolio sites are the same. Some are a pleasure to work with, others I would count as a strike against the designer.

Showcasing your best work

The ideal portfolio, whether hosted or your own, will allow the viewer to be able to quickly get at your best work. This means big images and good categorization. Some thoughts on the most popular sites out there:

Behance: This is by far the most popular service, which is unfortunate because it requires a lot of clicking on my end. The categorization is rolled into the same hierarchy as individual projects, so portfolios are often a mix of collections and one-off projects, which is confusing. If you have a diverse set of skills, Behance will not show them off. Also, the preview icons are small, which necessitates a click to find out what’s going on. Behance also has all sorts of useless information on the page, which reduces the amount of your work you can get on the screen and increases my inefficiency.

Cargocollective: Another popular one and it can do some impressive formats. The problem is that people don’t use them. The typical Cargocollective portfolio I see is a righthand text list of projects or clients, usually in a small type and a smattering of 200×130 thumbnails. There is no real hierarchy, which results in a lot of wasted clicks. Cargocollective does strip out all the useless info that surrounds Behance portfolios, but it often leaves a hole for content, which few designers opt to fill with further design or useful info.

DeviantArt: I’m a big fan of DeviantArt and have been a member since 2003. The portfolio offering does a lot of things right. This is different than the gallery on your DeviantArt page: please don’t send me there, it’s a mess. The basic structure of daportfolio.com is a list of categories, which take me into the projects or samples. The project images are nice and big, which is what I am looking for. The images roll through in slideshow format and I can usually get a good sense of your work in 10 clicks or less. My main gripe about daportfolio is they afford the designer little room for personality or personalization and the fixed-width/ non-responsive design is a bit dated.

Carbonmade: It’s generally a pleasure to view a Carbonmade portfolio, as they do much of what daportfolio does right — hierarchies and large images — but also allow the designer to express some of their style in the portfolio design itself. While some Carbonmade portfolios are put in a clickable slideshow, there is also an option for a scrolling presentation. I generally prefer to use the scroll wheel on my mouse rather than click to view content.

Visual.ly: I am certainly biased, but it’s worth noting that some sites are really geared to certain types of content. Often, video or interactives will be displayed poorly on the above sites. Likewise, infographics — which are often very tall — end up displayed awkwardly. If you have infographics in your portfolio, I suggest you get them on Visual.ly.

Recipe for a successful portfolio page

There seem to be portfolio sites popping up all the time so if they can follow this basic recipe, you can have a winner.

Use categorization. If you have 20 illustrations, 10 site designs and 6 infographics, group them! Ditto, if you have 5 projects for Coca-Cola and 4 for Adobe. This helps me get an overview of what I am looking at and I can focus on the quality of the work rather than deciphering the context.

Go big or go home! I suspect most creative directors like myself have some pretty big screens. Do not be afraid to use big images, even in thumbnails, to show off your work. Large images stimulate more of my cerebral cortex and if the work is good, this will easily put you in the “memorable” category.

Don’t get too fancy. Please refrain from unnecessary fading or moving effects; those just slow me down. They may impress a wide-eyed potential client, but it’s just friction to me. Krop uses this technique and it’s irritating as hell. Not the frame of mind you want me in when looking at your work.

Do you need the network? Many portfolio sites are network and community oriented. Dribbble is a great example and Behance goes down this road too. A community of your peers can be a great asset to your progression and networking ability but it’s superfluous to someone who is evaluating your work. Please do not send me any Dribbble profiles! I do suggest designers maintain an active Dribbble, Forrst or Behance account for the community benefits but also have a separate profile that they link to when showing clients or employers.

Your portfolio is an expression of yourself, but always remember the intended audience. If you are actively seeking clients or a job, you should try to stand out but err on the side of efficiency and ease of use. Employers who have a stack of 100 portfolios to go through will thank you for it, maybe with a job!

Jess Bachman is a Creative Director at Visual.ly. Follow him on Twitter.

Turns out, the PACs spend very differently from each other and those spending patterns reflect how their campaigns are run. The big money, like Gingrich and Santorum’s PACs, largely sunk their money into traditional TV media. Ron Paul’s PAC, on the other hand, went online for most of their spending, as many of Ron Paul’s supporters are engaged in social media. Romney, being the front runner, had oppositional funding far outweigh that spent in support of his campaign. His own PAC spent huge sums taking out Gingrich and Santorum and very little supporting Romney himself. There are lots more stories to be found, so click around the interactive graphic and explore.

Tableau is a sophisticated tool for data visualizations, and this project wouldn’t have been possible without data analyst Lori Williams, who not only collected and cleaned the data (an enormous undertaking, as you can imagine), but also helped us work with the software.

The thing with viral infographics is, great content won’t always float to the top. Our social world moves at a thousand links a second and thinking that if you build it, they will come is… well, naive.

The first step, and perhaps most obvious, is to create something awesome. If you are trying to push something mediocre, you have an exponentially more difficult task. Given all the noise out there around infographics these days, you need exceptional content.

The next best practice is to target your marketing efforts. Getting your graphic featured on popular group blogs like Boingboing or general media outlets like Huffington Post is great, but unless you have a prior relationship with the editors there, chances are your email will be just spam in their inbox and may hurt any future relationships you’ll try to establish. If your infographic is about social media, target Mashable; if it’s about startups, target TechCrunch; if it’s about online security, target… security blogs. You get the idea. Start with the biggest names and work your way down. These people are looking for content related to their niche, and often infographics make good content.

How you communicate with these bloggers is hugely important. Email requests that feel formulaic will most likely be immediately disregarded. Bloggers get requests all the time and simply saying “Dear XYZ, I really enjoy the post on your ABC blog” will not cut it. Take five or even ten minutes to think over how you’ll approach each blogger or editor to let them know that they’re special, that you know what their blog is about and why your graphic would be a good fit. Offer a 48-hour exclusive.

Forget about prepackaged embed codes. Those may have worked well in the past but some bad practices were built upon it and it makes bloggers suspicious. Competent bloggers know how to add an image to a post. Many infographics are meant to be link bait, that’s fine, but don’t attempt to take the linking out of the blogger’s hands. If you really want that anchor text, try a line like “Jess, if you enjoy this graphic and put it on your blog, can I suggest you link the word “bed bugs” to “bedbugs.org”: I’d really appreciate it.” Be honest, humble and most importantly, human. Bloggers know what SEO is, they all play the same game.

As always, the gold standard here is to establish relationships with influencers and bloggers prior to hawking them your wares. Unless you are only going to market one infographic in your life, a little effort upfront will pay off big overtime. Is there an influential blogger out there you want to get in with? Why not write to them and say you produce infographics and ask them if there are any subjects they think would be cool to see visualized. Or offer an un-branded, or publication-branded infographic about a subject that would interest their readers. It’s hard to say no to free content, but afterwards, it can be hard to say no when you offer up a branded infographic. Remember, people ask bloggers and editors for things all the time, why not offer something upfront. And please do not offer money, it’s insulting, and would only work on inferior blogs.

The bad news is that successful outbound emailing of publications takes a good amount of effort. The good news: everyone else is lazy and it can be easy to stand out from the crowd if you want to. Go in humble, respectful, and with something to offer, and you will find a lot of people willing to republish your work.

Jess Bachman is a Creative Director at Visual.ly. He runs a personal blog and receives a constant stream of emails pitching infographics.

It’s all about the audience

Just as the voice and style you use in a written article needs to match the audience — you wouldn’t use haikus for tech product reviews, would you? — the design style will need to match your audience for maximum impact. Do you have some data around unemployment or job trends? Think of your audience… WSJ readers, news carnivores: do they want something ultra clean and modern with appreciation of artistic ideals? Probably not. What about large icons or some colorful characters and cartoons? No thanks. But present it to them clearly, maybe draw in some influences from an actual newspaper, and you have something that speaks to them.

Draw inspiration from the content

While reflecting your audience, your design should also imbue its content. Diagramming how poor people get scammed? Try using some pavement textures… maybe some cardboard, too. If your topic is about schools, make it look and feel like a student’s workspace. Using a tactile design is something I do often. One reason is because I much prefer Photoshop and its realism over Illustrator. 

Don’t get carried away, though. While I often drop in what is referred to as marginalia to add some extra “stuff” to a design, it doesn’t always work, and if you are using it to beef up a weak concept, it will show. Marginalia is great for adding context to a design without taking up space with a verbal description. While it may not be worth 1,000 words, the right image in the right place can help the viewer get a better feel of the subject at hand.

Curb your design enthusiasm

Often, and especially with more advanced data visualizations, your design just needs to get out of the way. Cleaner and clearer design will work best here.  Sometimes I just can’t help myself and will throw in a paper texture or something to provide some mood. As long as the data is in the foreground, you should be OK.

Avoid visual quagmires

While infographics can convey a lot of information, it’s important to let the design breathe. Sometimes the data can be dense conceptually and when the graphic is also dense visually, it’s a bit overwhelming. If the charts are easy to read, you can pack them to the rafters, as the viewer can scan. But when there is little white space and everything is filled with text, facts, charts or images (not my design) then it becomes a visual quagmire. Quagmires don’t spread virally.

I won’t go into the fine-grained details of infographic design, as that is usually the territory of each individual designer and their style, but the outline above should set you out in a clear direction for maximum impact and, hopefully, virality.

Jess Bachman is a Creative Director at Visual.ly.

Infographics, with their constantly shifting definition, are nothing more than a communication tool and can be abused just as easily as the 3D pie chart button in Excel. A strong infographic has a strong data backend, but that data doesn’t have to be numerical.

Data-vis communicates data. Infographics communicate information. Information can be data and data can be information. The bottom line is, your data should be solid, whether it’s represented by numbers, or by facts.

When I first started doing infographics, my sources of inspiration came from data sets that I came across. Federal unemployment data? Make an infographic. Economic trade data? Make an infographic. CIA World Fact Book? Make an infographic.

But then I started to realize that some of the articles I read were data too, only text-based data. And it could be conveyed in a visual way. The myriad of issues that plague GM? Make an infographic. The myriad of issues that led to the 2008 financial crisis? Make an infographic. You get the idea. Infographics can be a great medium for conveying complicated information, especially if it’s a collection of concepts, ideas, or connections.

On the other hand, infographics can be a fun way to convey boring and pedestrian information. A list of temperatures is data for an infographic. Densities of substances is data for an infographic. 

But this visualizing lists stuff is a slippery slope. Always make sure the infographic is either fun (which speaks to design) or has an angle (which speaks to the story).

If you don’t have a point of view, or if your data doesn’t draw any conclusions, why would anyone care what you have to say?

 This is where you typically end up with a “collection-of-facts” infographic, and those are easy to hate. People love trivia, there is nothing wrong with that. But trivia is not data that is conducive to infographics any more. Those may have gone viral a few years ago, but are cringe-inducing today, now that our audiences are more infographic-savvy.

Supplement your data with more research

So while anything can be data, data is rarely served on a silver platter waiting to be visualized. If you find yourself reading an article and think it would make a good visual, great: get started visualizing it, but know that it doesn’t end there. In every single case, I have had to augment the main peice of research (data) with my own research (data). For non-numerical infographics, formats like flowcharts, timelines, or even metaphor-based depictions work best. You will often have to dig forward or backwards to complete a timeline or fill in connected nodes in a flowchart to make it comprehensible to a visual person.  This requires more data and more research, so get out there and dig it up. The more original research and analysis you add to your graphic, the greater its chance of virality.

Reach out to the experts

My best-kept secret for unearthing unique analysis is to work with the experts. I am a graphic designer first, a researcher second, and an expert last. I had heard some interesting stats about the malware underground and wanted to put together a chart of the economy of it all. Googled research was a bust so I put out a call for an expert on hackernews. I was contacted by an ‘expert’ who was able to fill in a lot of the blanks. When I did a piece on student loans, I contacted the owner of StudenLoanJustice.org. The research for a diagram of how google works came from Aaron Wall of SEOBook. Many of these experts really enjoy the chance to see their cause and expertise turned into an infographic. Reach out to them, pick their brain, and offer sourcing credit or a link. Their expertise is usually better and more unique than your Googled research and they can certainly help speed an informative infographic along.

If you’ve noticed that any discussion of proper numerical data techniques is missing from this post, it’s because I am leaving that to my more learned colleagues. My eyes start to cross when I’m in Excel for longer than a few minutes, and if you are the same way, you can still create awesome infographics. The data is all around you. An article you read. Your personal history. Even a trip to the store can yield data that is best communicated in an infographic. If your story resonates, and your data is strong, then going viral is just a matter of putting it out there.

Jess Bachman is a Creative Director at Visual.ly.

Whether you think they are the love child of data and journalism, or the bastard child of SEO and link bait, it doesn’t matter: the medium of visual communication is here to stay.

So how do you make an infographic that’s not only good, but ends up doing what you ultimately want to it do: resonate with people and blow up the web?
 

There are three main components to an awesome infographic:
story, design, and data.

Depending on your purpose, you likely don’t need all three. The most important one, at least to the viral end, is the story. And the story is usually where most of the “fail” happens. Below, I’ll give you my top four strategies for finding and telling good stories with infographics.

But before we get into the details, a little history. Newspapers – remember those? — have been publishing “infographics” as graphic companions to articles for decades. But infographics, in their current form, became popular in 2009 as a different and fun way to present and consume information on the Web. People began to share and link to them and, soon enough, all these links began to elevate the sites’ Google rank on related searches — and even more companies and services  began to get into the game. Some – such as Mint.com and its popular blog, MintLife (where most of my early work was published) – made good use of infographics, thanks in part to their focus on money and finance, where interesting topics abound.

What’s the Problem, Then?

The problem is, if you are a law firm specializing in mesothelioma, you need to produce an infographic about mesothelioma, in hopes that people will link to you with the proper anchor text. Virality requires a broader appeal — but that doesn’t stop every infographic producer from trying to push their niche content onto mass appeal platforms and blogs.

That’s why so many niche infographics suck: they simply don’t have any hooks in the zeitgeist. Take this one about mesothelioma. Are people talking about asbestos these days? No, that ship sailed decades ago. This doesn’t mean asbestos is not an important topic, just that the story is cold and will have no viral legs. There may be a new angle, but that would require some real research and these types of SEO-related infographics are often done with a minimal budget.

Instead, you get the typical “collection of facts” infographic done with a rushed and insulting design. You see it with every holiday. Producers looking to cash in on a predictable event, like Valentine’s Day. There is no new angle, so producers make an attempt to ramp up the other aspects with superfluous design.

So how do you get a great story?

Find the Gaps

The easiest method is to try to identify holes in the zeitgeist. These are often disconnects between what people are talking about, and what people are comprehending. Back in 2008, everyone was worried about the financial crisis, but often the media were just talking heads with no context… Just what was this crisis all about? It was an excellent opportunity to fill that hole with an infographic and myself at Mint.com, as well as numerous others, produced some big winners.

Make People Angry

Another tactic I use is create an infogrpahic to expose scams or otherwise make people angry. Many people have personal and emotional reactions to subjects like student loans, for example. But it doesn’t have to be a huge, serious issue.

A big win can be achieved simply by outlining the case against overpriced HDMI cables. Why did it work? Because at the time, many people were buying HDMI cables and the shopping experience often involved some sales rep steering you to a $50+ cable. There was something wrong there and even though the pain point was low, it was broad.

What pain points are you experiencing these days? Large corporations preying on the poor? Gold buying scams? You can bet others are angry about those things as well, and would rally behind an informative infographic.

Find a Compelling Story — or Let It Go

Producers often start with the data or a “collection of facts” and try to fabricate a story from it. I’ve been guilty of this myself, and while it may have worked in 2009 when infographics were novel, it’s pretty much a non-starter today.

If your data is real data — not factoids — then you have to find the angle and story in there.  You have to do some digging into that spreadsheet. Sometimes the story isn’t there, or it’s just not worth reporting. You need to move on. If you don’t, you will end up jazzing up weak data with over-the-top visuals and other chart junk to make an impact. Trust me, I’ve been there, it’s a lonely place.

You Don’t Need to Change the World

That’s last point I want to make about the story. Not everything on Digg and reddit is life changing. People flock to sites like LifeHacker for simple and useful bits of information. If you come across something along those lines, and you think it might work better as a visual, then visualize it! I came across the mathmetical formula for validating a credit card and thought it was cool, but also complicated. Turns out a visual presentation was all that was needed to bring some old nugget of info to the forefront. These graphics should take less time, so if you fail at making it go viral, learn and move on.

About That Mesothelioma…

Can that subject be saved? It could, if you take the an opposite angle. What’s the deal with this personal injury or class action legal process anyway. Why are so many lawyers looking for mesothelioma cases? There is a disconnect between what people hear and what they understand. Turn that into an infographic, while maintaining a standard of ethics, and you will have a winner.

So, there it is, the first step to making your infographic blow up: Find a story. News sources, blogs, data sets, API’s: they are overflowing with stories that could use the visual language of infographics. Let the rest of the linkbaiters have the bulleted lists. You are a designer, analyst, and journalist. Put all those skills to use and virality is often a nice side effect.

Jess Bachman knows a thing or two about creating viral infographics. His work has been featured on high-trafficked blogs, national publications and network TV. He has hit the front page of social sites like Digg and reddit 50+ times and has designed graphics that have hit more than 1 million pageviews… along with some that have failed completely. He is now a Creative Director at Visual.ly.

Questions? Post them in the comment section below.

Jess Bachman is a Creative Director at Visual.ly. See more of his designs here.