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The Progression of Sue Griffey’s Year-End Infographic

Updated on: Jan 16th, 2023
Reports
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Are you working on a year-end infographic?

Maybe you’d like to showcase your company’s achievements over the past year.

Maybe you’d like to celebrate your own achievements.

Infographics are a great way to visualize key points (without boring our audiences, which can happen in lengthy reports).

Back in December 2022, Sue Griffey brought her draft infographics to our weekly Office Hours.

In this blog post, you’ll see Sue Griffey’s annual infographic for her global mentoring practice, SueMentors.

You’ll also see several of Sue’s drafts. I hope this behind-the-scenes view helps you develop your own infographic.

Watch the Progression

You can watch Sue’s progression here.

This is a 7-minute segment from an hour-long Office Hours session.

Here’s what’s inside.

Sue’s Previous Infographics

First, Sue shared three examples of past years’ infographics.

Draft 1: Six Tiles of Content

Then, we talked about orientation.

Should her infographic be square?

Rectangular??

Portrait???

Landscape????

A single image?????

Several standalone images??????

A decade ago, infographics were mostly portrait. I’ll never forget Chris Lysy’s cartoon from 2014, where he joked that 2:32 aspect ratio infographics could practically be used as belts.

Nowadays, infographics can be any orientation. Ideally, we’d customize the infographic to the platform where it’s being shared.

For example, Instagram used to require squares, although you can upload square or rectangular images nowadays. And now the algorithm prefers short video Reels over images. It’s tough to keep up!

What does LinkedIn’s algorithm prefer? That’s Sue’s primary platform for connecting with others. Should her infographic be square? Rectangular?? How about both???

We considered a modular, grid-like design.

Sue already had 6 buckets of information. What a nice round number!

That means she could organize her 6 existing topics in landscape…

…and/or portrait…

…and/or as 6 individual social media posts.

In the video, you’ll see Sue’s very first draft:

Draft 2: Adjusting Colors and Adding Visuals

Next, Sue “softened all the brand colors.”

She added icons.

She added white overlays to de-emphasize the icons.

Draft 3: Focusing on Brand Blue

Sue decided to go back to “one panel of blue” (her brand color).

She added a “road map” within the TV icon.

She created a bit.ly link so that readers could learn more.

She continued softening the icons.

 “I challenged myself to take out even more words,” Sue explained.

Final Version: Smaller Boxes with More “White” Space

On New Year’s Eve Day, Sue finished her “80% is good enough” final draft.

She made the boxes smaller, which added more “white” space between the buckets of information.

Next Steps

In all her “spare” time, Sue might write a long-form blog post to elaborate on each of these 6 topics.

(She did provide additional details in a document shared publicly on Dropbox, too.)

But, as we discussed in the video, “there are endless ways to recycle content.” At some point, we have to create deadlines for ourselves and move on to the next item on our to-do lists.

Software Used: Microsoft PowerPoint

During Office Hours, another participant asked Sue which software platform she used to create her year-end infographic.

It’s PowerPoint!

Sue said, “It’s the easiest way to move photos around and to keep graphics together.”

In a previous Office Hours, we opened Canva together and browsed their year-end infographic templates. I wasn’t impressed. There were just bullet points, icons, and photos—all of which can be handled inside PowerPoint, too. Plus, Sue’s already comfortable in PowerPoint. Every new software platform has a learning curve. We can’t spend time learning them all. PowerPoint worked perfectly fine and there was no reason to switch.

“I did feel like I was moving information around and conveying things much better than I did a year ago,” Sue said. I agree. Well done!!!

Connect with Sue Griffey

You can view Sue’s infographic on LinkedIn here.

And don’t forget to connect with Sue on LinkedIn.

More about Ann K. Emery
Ann K. Emery is a sought-after speaker who is determined to get your data out of spreadsheets and into stakeholders’ hands. Each year, she leads more than 100 workshops, webinars, and keynotes for thousands of people around the globe. Her design consultancy also overhauls graphs, publications, and slideshows with the goal of making technical information easier to understand for non-technical audiences.

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