As marketing and market research continue to move at a faster pace it is getting more and more difficult to hold our stakeholder's attention. There is no doubt that a beautiful and well-designed infographic can do a masterful job of communicating to a wide audience and making sure that the results of your study have an outsized impact on the organization.

Need some inspiration for your next infographic?  Here are five easy tips to help instantly improve your designs.

1. Use a Simple Style

When creating an infographic, you're going to want to keep things simple and easy to read. The "flat" style is very in right now, so ditch the drop shadows & 3-D bevels and opt for a more basic rendering of your graphics.

2. Limit Fonts

It's very easy to get carried away with using multiple fonts in one project. After all, there are so many great typefaces to choose from! There's nothing wrong with only using one font and keeping things interesting by using different variations or weights (size hierarchy, all caps, bold, italic, etc).

3. Limit Garnishes

Unless it serves a specific purpose, eliminate any extra decorations or graphical elements that don't contribute to your point. Ask yourself, "Does this help get my point across?" If the answer is no, get rid of it. Keep it simple.

4. Use Colors Thoughtfully

When establishing a color scheme, it's important to keep everything consistent. If you're comparing two products, for example, and product A is blue, make sure everything having to do with product A continues to be blue throughout the infographic. By color-coding information, your viewer is more likely to remember the facts you're presenting.

5. Make it Shareable, Short, & Sweet

First and foremost, make sure that your image quality is the best it can be and that it doesn't take too long to load. Keep your infographic concise and easy to follow, or else people will give up halfway through because they've lost interest. And finally, make it likeable! Feel free to throw in some humor or intriguing headlines to entice the viewer to share it.

It is great to see the increasing appreciation for well-designed data visualizations. Data visualization has gone from a niche specialty to something that is being discussed at the beginning of nearly every foundational research project. We have been developing infographics for our big studies (especially segmentation and market landscape studies) for years and we are always on the lookout for new inspiration.

Our design team has been building a Pinterest board with some cool infographics, which you can check out here (be sure to follow us there too!):