Moving along on my Infographics Obsession. I never said the 30 days would be continuous days, as some of these tools are more complicated than you’d think. Easel.ly is just one of those tools that took some time to adjust to. After several days of start and give up, I finally was able to render an infographic using Easel.ly www.easel.ly. I’d like to tell you that this is the solution, but it’s still very buggy, bit it definitely has potential.
easel.lyFeatures I like
- Ability to upload images (such as logos – so far the only one that lets you)
- Ability to upload charts (much easier than battling with their tools)
- Lots of cool icons to choose from (such as the hipster in this infographic)
- Grids and snap to of various elements for proper alignment
- Some cool templates to get your started (although I used the blank canvas)
Needs some help
- WordPress login is not designed from something like this (hello – have you heard of Facebook / Twitter logins?)
- Elements sometimes move around on their own
- Text editor is buggy and has a mind of its own sometimes
- Bugs with the background, I wasn’t able to change the layout or the background color
- Blank canvas should be just that, get rid of the instructions
- Embedding the image – there was just one size option and so I had to manually edit the image as it bleed into the right-hand column of this blog. Easier to download the image to your hard drive than to use their embed code.
- Images I uploaded got pixellated when I tried to shrink them to the size I wanted.
Bottom Line
So, all in all, probably the most flexibly option if you want to insert your own images, but it’s still somewhat buggy. I look forward to future releases as this certainly is a good alternative to hiring a designer for creating attractive visualizations.
