I was pretty excited to review Visual.ly as I thought it was a tool I could use to create a cool infographics on the topic of my choice. Unfortunately that’s not what they offer – at least not yet. Visual.ly is currently more like of a gallery of infographics where designers can post their creations. But they have started to offer some visualizations leveraging Facebook and Twitter data that are pretty fun and well designed. Plus they’re “coming soon” section boasts of future visualizations you can create on topics such as sports, food and politics.
What I liked
- Very easy to use
- Multiple design options for the same visualization
- Super easy to use (takes all of 30 seconds to create a visualization)
- Great place to get inspiration for your own custom visualization
What I didn’t like
- Very limited topics to create infographics
- It compared my Twitter account to Kim Kardashian
Bottom line
I’m only 5-days into my 30 days of reviews, but it’s dawning on me that there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution for my infographic generator quest. If you’re looking for a tool to create your own custom infographic on a specific subject, Visual.ly ain’t it. You can give Piktochart a shot if you have a lot of time and no money, but there are lots of limitations. Maybe they’ll come up with something in the future that will be useful. It’s cool if you want to analyze your own Twitter for Facebook accounts, but probably not a tool you’d use to share info with the world.
That said, Visual.ly is a great place to go for inspiration for your project. You can scan their collection for all sorts of infographics and try to decide which ones work, and which don’t, and why. trying to figure out what you want to create in terms of your visualization, this is a great repository to find cool examples of what other folks are doing. You also could find a great designer to do it for you.
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Thanks for your posts. You are right (as well as your friend Bob) in that vizliuisataons should be used more in PR & communication but they should be done right too. We made a lil error (actually quite big) relying on Illustrator % change of shape only instead of our own calculations. As new bloggers we let it through. It was updated earlier today. We’ll improve.@mstrass