Images and Infographics

Most people are highly visual in nature, probably due to our highly visible (and lazy) culture. While you need to make your written content top-notch, don't skimp out on the images. These can keep the reader an extra few seconds by being interesting, and maybe get them to read your content. They can also help explain, back up, or elaborate on your content.

Infographics are awesome tools for giving a big chunk of info in a small, visually-appealing section. They are made so that you can get the general gist at a glance, and understand a concept, process, or idea with minimal reading. You can check out some sweet inforgraphics here, here, and here.

White Space is Not Your Enemy has great information about images and infographics in chapters 10 and 11. I'll try not to restate them and instead share some additional information.

The biggest mistakes I see on the web regarding images are:

• Theft of images
• Throwing all the bells and whistles of whatever program used into the image
• Using too low quality images, or too small of images (or blowing up a small image huge resulting in severe pixelation)
• Promoting Instagram'd, Picnik'd, etc. images like they're awesome professional stuff
• Images that have nothing to do with content
• Including non-professional snapshot-type images just because they pertain to your text

Images are your eye-catchers. They are what the viewer will notice first on your website, so they need to be high quality, professional, and enhance your content.