Guide

Infographic design tips: typography, colour, hierarchy and charts

Once the content of a sheet is settled, the remaining work is craft. These are the rules that make the difference between a page people read and a page people admire and forget.

Use three type sizes, not seven

A reference sheet needs a headline, a section heading and body text. That is three sizes, with a clear jump between each — roughly double from body to heading, and double again to the headline. Timid increments read as accidents. Everything else (captions, footnotes, source lines) should be the body size in a lighter weight or a muted colour, not a fourth and fifth size.

Two typefaces is the ceiling: one for display, one for text. If you only have one good one, use one.

Give colour a job

Every colour on the page should mean something. A dark neutral for structure, one accent for "look here", one secondary accent for a second category — and that is usually enough. When a design has eight colours, none of them signals anything, because the reader cannot learn a code that complex in ten seconds.

Keep body text at a strong contrast ratio against its background (4.5:1 as the floor), and never encode a distinction in hue alone — pair it with a label, an icon or a position so it survives greyscale printing and colour-blind readers.

Whitespace is structure, not waste

The instinct on a dense sheet is to fill every gap. Resist it. Space between clusters is what tells the eye where one idea ends and the next begins; without it, a reader has to parse the whole page as one block. Apply proximity consistently: elements that belong together sit closer to each other than to anything else, and a heading sits nearer the content it introduces than the content above it.

Align to a grid and hold it. Most amateur-looking pages are not badly styled, they are badly aligned.

Pick the honest chart

Bar charts for comparing quantities. Lines for change over time. A single stacked bar or one pie for parts of a whole — never a row of pies, which nobody can compare. Scatter for relationships. Maps only when location is the point, not as decoration.

Start bar axes at zero; a truncated axis exaggerates differences and is the fastest way to lose a careful reader's trust. Skip 3D effects, drop shadows on data and decorative gradients inside bars — they add ink without adding information. Label values directly on the chart when there are few enough to fit; a legend is a lookup task you are handing to the reader.

Icons should be a set

Mixed icon styles — some filled, some outlined, different stroke weights, different corner radii — are the most common tell of a rushed sheet. Choose one family and stay in it. Icons should support a label, not replace it; a pictogram alone is ambiguous to anyone outside your context.

Write short, write flat

Text on a sheet is not prose. Aim for fragments a reader can absorb in one glance: a bolded number, a five-word label, a one-line explanation. Cut adjectives, cut hedging, cut anything the picture already says. Front-load each line with its most informative word, because scanning readers rarely finish a line.

Mistakes worth avoiding

· Text over a busy photograph with no scrim behind it.
· Type below about 8pt on anything intended for print.
· A logo larger than the headline.
· Centre-aligning long runs of text.
· Rotated labels that force the reader to tilt their head.
· Rounding inconsistently — 3.7%, 4%, and 4.25% in the same block.
· Forgetting the footer: no source, no date, no attribution.

Test before you ship

Print it at actual size and read it at arm's length. View it as a phone thumbnail. Convert it to greyscale. Hand it to someone unfamiliar with the subject and ask what it says — if they cannot answer your one question in ten seconds, the fix is almost always removing something, not adding.

Start further back with how to make an infographic, or see finished examples.