10 Tips for Designing Effective Visual Communication

There are a lot of bad habits that designers display in their visual communication. The term "infographic" has been a buzz word for a little while now. When hearing the word we tend to immediately think of callouts of percentages, large numbers, and millions of useless icons. Hopefully when designing visual communication we are taking the time to think about what the purpose is. Sometimes we should assume the viewer actually knows something, so we don't try and explain (and overcomplicate) every little detail. This handy little guide produced by Column Five Media should help you out.As many of you might already know, I got a job with C5 right out of college. At that point I had only taken a single class on data design, and still didn't really grasp the importance of it. But the clients and jobs C5 were working on looked fun and I decided I would give it a shot. Pretty quickly I began to understand the ingredients to successful visual communication. We weren't just making flat infographics for blogs, we were applying this knowledge to video, web, apps, everything! The same principals applied in all cases, it was just a matter of getting past the need to fill the project with pointless elements just to make it seem fuller.  So take a look at the graphic below and learn from one of the best.