Infographic Design

This workbook turns the Infographic Design course into one real, finished, fact-checked infographic. Each section pairs with a course module and mixes guided exercises, fill-in worksheets, and checklists so you end up with an actual shippable piece - a defensible chart, a consistent visual system, and correctly sized exports - not just notes. Work through it with a real dataset open in Google Sheets or Excel and your chosen design tool (Figma, Canva, or Illustrator) on screen. The value is in the infographic you build and the decisions you write down, so a skeptical reader could trust every number on it.

Find the single story in a real dataset and lock the governing question before any pixels are placed.

Pick a real, public dataset you find interesting (try Our World in Data, data.gov, the World Bank, Statistics Canada, or a Kaggle CSV). Open it in Google Sheets or Excel and run the analysis pass from the course: clean inconsistent labels and decide how blanks are handled, then build a PivotTable or use SUM/AVERAGE/COUNTIF to collapse the rows into a handful of totals you can actually see. Hunt for one comparison worth showing.

Fill this out before opening any design tool. It takes ten minutes and constrains every later choice. Keep it visible while you work and check new elements against the governing question.

Choose the right chart for each question, strip it to its evidence, and audit it for the ways charts mislead.

For each key number from your brief, name the intent (comparison, composition, distribution, or relationship) and the chart that answers it honestly. Reject pie charts with more than three slices, dual y-axes, and any 3D form. Fill one row per number.

Build one of your charts with the default settings in Excel or Sheets and screenshot it. Then rebuild it stripped using the data-ink pass: delete border and background fill, mute or remove gridlines, drop the legend in favor of direct labels, sort the bars by value, and give only the bar that matters one accent color while the rest go gray. Place the before and after side by side.

Lock the reusable type scale, accessible palette, and single-family icon set that make the piece feel like one object.

Define your reusable system before laying anything out, then save each as a named style in your tool (text styles and color styles in Figma; paragraph and swatch styles in Illustrator). Keep to three type levels and a small palette.

Run your palette through a color-blindness simulator (Coblis or the Stark plugin) and then view your charts in grayscale. Check text and meaningful graphics for WCAG contrast (aim for at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text). Fix anything that relies on color alone by adding labels, patterns, or position.

Take the single proportion a lay reader should feel (your hero number) and design it as a pictograph / isotype: repeat one small icon where each unit equals a fixed quantity (e.g. 10 figures at 10 percent each, or 1 in 7 highlighted). Follow Neurath's rule - show more of a quantity with more same-size symbols, never one bigger symbol.

Compose the flow on a grid, assemble in your tool, and export accessible, sourced, correctly sized files.

Before building, sketch the whole infographic as rough thumbnails - boxes and squiggles, no real content - structured as hook (title plus hero number), body (three to five sections, each a chart plus one sentence), and close (takeaway plus sources). Then hand the thumbnail to someone and watch their eyes travel it.

Plan the assembly so you avoid rework: set the canvas to the final destination size first, build the system, then the content. Record your destinations and the format each needs.