Infographic SHSU Assignment for LSSL 5391

 Infographics

I will be critiquing three infographic web applications and picking the one that I feel is best suited for me. The three different ones are Easel.ly, Infogram, and Piktochart.

Easel.ly is a great infographic tool that has some great visual ideas. To start off, I clicked on a great free account where it took me right into creating a new design. When I clicked on the pricing it did show that students would have to pay $2 a month, teachers $4 a month, and business $5 a month. I definitely would think that users would try the free version before making the decision to upgrade and start paying the monthly fees.  One of the features I did like was that it allows users to download an Ebook where it shows different answers to questions about infographics. Especially ideas for your very first infographic and a simple guide on how to use Easel.ly. This is a great way to show students or staff how to create infographics with easy to follow steps. When you click on “templates” it shows some public templates that allow for editing. I counted them and there are only 19 available within the free version. I clicked on one of them and it allowed me to edit it. The different options for editing are graphics to add photos. In the graphics part it allows searching for icons, photos, animations, uploads, and lines. The lines part was something new to me and I thought ,wow what is this? But, it was literally just 4 options of different arrows/lines. The text box allowed for titles, headers, and body texts. The backgrounds were just plain colors and the charts tab only allowed for 4 basic charts. Now, if this was the only infographic tool it would work, but, I feel like it wasn’t so inviting. The pictures did look a little dull and so did the infographics templates that were available. 

 Infogram is such an interesting and creative name since it has somewhat of the word infographic in it. The free basic plan allows for 37 interactive chart types, up to 10 projects, up to 5 pages per project, 13 map types , and allows for importing data and publishing. There are many more other plans with the least expensive being 19 a month, which is not cheap at all. I went ahead and clicked "create" and it allowed me to click a blank template or different options to start off with. For example, templates for charts, maps, infographics, Instagram or Facebook posts, posters, and reports. For a newbie like me I believe starting from scratch would be quite difficult. In this case the clicking on the infographic templates was more suitable. The first thing that it shows you is if you would like to publish on the web, meaning it would have a viewable URL or to keep it private. Well, to keep it private you would need the upgraded version. That was a big no for me. I went ahead and tried the public version to use the features.  I think it was very easy to follow and for it being the free version there was a lot of neat stuff to input into the template. I absolutely loved the GIF’s that you can put into it and the stickers. This would make it very visual for students to use. 

Piktochart really is so inviting and shows the templates in a way that is very similar to Canva. As soon as I started going through the templates I could see the similarity and frankly it made me feel comfortable that it was like Canva. When it comes to the pricing, the free version only allows for 5 visuals, 2 downloads, and 20 minutes of video for free. To be honest, this was a bummer since I really liked the site. Now, the Pro version is 39.99 a year. Now, that isn't so bad since it's the whole year, but it is not a very cheap and reasonable price for a teacher. I clicked on the template and loved the design components of it. The graphics, text, colors, charts, maps, and the editor tips had a lot of options. I clicked on the charts and loved how there were so many options for it being a free version. I can’t stress enough how it reminded me  so much of Canva.

What I used:

I used Piktochart to create an infographic on  an article from Pew Research Center titled Teens, Social Media and Technology 2022. I really enjoyed trying to find a template that matched the article and finding different fonts and ways to make it simple yet conveying information. A lot of the illustrations I did want to use did require a Pro account, but I just had to look for the ones that didn’t. When editing, I did have to click multiple times and to move the textbook too. It definitely does require time and patience to create an infographic. 

Here is my infographic: 

https://create.piktochart.com/output/36e7b85b93fd-teens-social-media-and-technology

Sources:

Vogels, E. A. (2022, August 10). Teens, social media and technology 2022. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/