As their name suggests, health and fitness infographics provide a means of communicating information through graphic elements. These graphic elements can be things like illustrations, charts, diagrams or graphs.
Health and fitness infographics provide an effective means of communicating concepts or information in a way that enhances comprehension while capturing attention.
And you can use fitness infographics to promote a service or product, visualize complex health and fitness data, encourage exercise and physical activity, educate your audience on a particular topic.
You can also use fitness infographics to summarize the results of a study or research or explain an exercise or workout program logically and clearly.
But for your fitness infographics to be effective, they will need to be well-designed and visually appealing. Fortunately, creating an effective and visually appealing fitness infographic is not that hard. Read on to learn more about how to create powerful and effective wellness infographics and workout infographics.
1. Define Your Goals and Objectives
Whether you intend to create a gym infographic, weight loss infographic, fitness infographic or wellness infographic, you first need to have a clear outline of what you intend to achieve. However, make sure your goals are specific and realistic.
When outlining your goals, you should ask yourself whether the information you intend to present is the right choice for your audience, whether the topic is too narrow or broad, whether it will confuse your audience as well as whether you are solving any problem.
Once you’ve outlined the goals for your fitness infographic, you then need to go ahead and ask yourself at least three to five main questions your health and wellness infographic will address. You should also have at least two supporting questions. These questions will provide the framework for your physical activity infographics.
For instance, you may decide to create a fitness industry infographic. For such an infographic, you can ask questions like:
- What’s the market size of the global fitness industry?
- How many health and fitness clubs are there worldwide?
- What is the average annual revenue of fitness clubs in the U.S?
- Which are the biggest health and fitness clubs by revenue in the U.S?
- Which is the average member retention rate for fitness centers?
By outlining your goals and identifying a few questions that support the goals you intend to achieve, you will have an outline that will form the basis of your health and wellness infographic.
2. Collect the Necessary Data
In the previous, you already identified five questions, which you intend to answer with your fitness industry infographic. And to answer those questions, you will need to collect relevant data.
Fortunately, numerous resources are available, which you can use to gather the relevant data for your infographic.
And you can start with Google. For instance, if you are looking for fitness industry statistics, a simple search on Google will open several pages, which contain the data you are looking for.
However, searching for data on Google can prove to be a time-consuming process. And this is where repositories come in. Data repositories provide useful, verified and ready-to-use data. Some of the most reliable data repositories include:
- The U.S Government Open Data
- Google Scholar
- AggData
- American Time Use Survey
- Pew Research
- Statista
Once you’ve finished gathering all the data you need for your health infographics, you should go a step further and verify your sources. If your data is not credible, then viewers will also treat your infographic as such. So, ensure all the data you intend to use is truthful and accurate.
3. Create Visuals Using the Data
By now, you’ve already figured out the questions you intend to answer in your gym infographic. You’ve also gathered the relevant data, which you will use to answer those questions.
So, how do you visualize that data? Well, the method you intend to visualize your data will depend on what you intend to achieve with it.
For instance, if you want your audience to explore the information and deduce their own insights, then an interactive chart may be the best choice.
On the other hand, if you are intending on showing relationships between the various data sets you’ve gathered for your health and wellness infographic, then you should opt for a style that depicts comparison. And a scatter plot will be the ideal choice in this case.
If you are comparing and contrasting, then you should go for an infographic that will allow that approach. And in this case, you can use elements like column charts, bar charts, bubble charts and bubble clouds, just to name a few.
You can also decide to use an infographic to present data in a simple format, which doesn’t need context or a deeper level of understanding to grasp the data. In this case, you can opt for a simple format like large, colorful text.
4. Create a Wireframe
At this point, you already have the data you intend to present on your infographic for health and wellness. You have also determined the visuals you will use based on what you intend to achieve with that data.
And now it’s time to start mapping out your conceptual design. To do so, you will need to create a wireframe. For a wireframe, you can simply use a grid layout, which you will use to organize all the elements that will go in your infographic.
You will use this symmetrical grid layout to figure out where the text and graphics will go before you start designing the entire piece.
Laying everything out will give you a chance to make corrections or revisions early in the design process. And you only need a piece of pen and paper to come up with a symmetrical grid.
In case you feel as if creating a grid layout from scratch will consume too much of your time, you can use a health infographic template, which are readily available online. You simply need to choose one that you can easily edit to align with the infographic you intend to present. And from there, you simply key in the data and you can commence the designing process.
5. Incorporate Design Elements
If you’ve followed and completed all the above steps, your fitness Instagram infographic should almost be ready by now.
You just need to choose some design elements and styles, which will make it visually appealing. To achieve this, you should pay attention to the following elements:
5.1 Text
Infographics should lean more towards the visual aspect. So, as much as you can’t present one without text, you should use it sparingly.
Also, ensure the text that you choose is not easy enough to comprehend for everyone. In fact, you should assume your target reader would be a sixth-grader.
Once you’ve selected the text that will accompany the graphics, you then need to settle on a readable font.
The font you choose for your health and fitness infographic is equally as important as the other design aspects.
Besides being readable, it should also complement other aspects of your health and fitness infographic.
Avoid hard-to-read fonts or typefaces, regardless of how stylish they look. You can also check Google for infographics inspiration.
Google’s library is filled with great options and ideas, which you can use as inspiration for your font choices.
5.2 Negative Spaces
Negative space or white space refers to the empty sections of an image. Negative spaces can help to boost your health and wellness infographics’ aesthetics when properly utilized.
So, try as much as possible to avoid overcrowding your infographic. Instead, you should leave some white spaces or negative spaces, which will make it easier for the reader to absorb the information.
With some breathing room, your infographic will appear clean, organized and professionally done.
5.3 Colors
There’s a high chance that you will be using or sharing your fitness health and wellness infographic online. To this end, you will need to select colors that align with screen displays.
Also, you should remember that exercise infographics will appear on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It’s highly likely you will share your infographic on your Instagram fitness account.
And such platforms usually have white backgrounds. So, you should avoid extremely bright colors or hues, which may stress the readers’ eyes. Instead, you should go for warm and pleasant tones.
Furthermore, you should avoid using too many colors, as they may end up distracting the reader. If possible, you should stick with a maximum of three to four colors. And if you have to go for additional color, it should be a tint or shade of the main colors.
6. Share Your Fitness Infographic
Now that you’ve completed creating and designing your workout infographic, it’s time to share it with your audience. And you can do so by posting it on your fitness Instagram account or other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. You should also post it on your fitness blog or website. Also, you can ask your friends or social media followers to share it on their social media platforms to boost its reach.
7. Closing Remarks
Designing infographics is not as hard as most people make it to be. As long as you follow the recommendations we’ve discussed above, then you shouldn’t have any problem coming up with a great infographic. The most important thing is to keep it simple and enjoy the process.