Infographic design for NGOs: a practical guide

Infographic design is not decoration. For an NGO, UN agency or ministry, an infographic has one job: to help a specific reader understand a finding quickly and remember it. That might be a donor scanning an annual report, a district official reading a policy brief, or a follower scrolling past on their phone.

If you are learning how to make an infographic, the most useful habit is to ask what the reader should know or do after looking at it. The data.europa.eu visualisation guide puts it simply: before choosing a chart, ask what message you are trying to communicate to your audience.¹ Everything else, from layout to colour, follows from that answer.

Most weak infographics for NGOs try to say everything in a programme report at once. Pick the single finding that matters most, write it as one sentence, and use that sentence as the headline. "Girls' secondary enrolment rose in all four districts" is a message. "Education results 2025" is a label.

Then name the audience and the channel. A board pack can hold more detail than a post on WhatsApp or LinkedIn. A field poster may be read from a distance, in more than one language, by people who do not read charts often. In our own practice, we agree the message, audience and main channel with the client in writing before any design starts, because it saves rounds of revisions later.

Chart choice should follow the pattern you want readers to see. The Financial Times graphics desk created its Visual Vocabulary to give designers shared terms for this, grouping charts by the relationship they show: deviation, correlation, ranking, distribution, change over time, magnitude and part-to-whole.¹

In practice, a few rules cover most development data. Use a line or column chart for change over time. Use a sorted bar chart when position in a list matters more than the exact value. Use a simple stacked bar or a pie with very few slices for part-to-whole. The data.europa.eu guide stresses that these suggestions are starting points, because the same data can support several charts.¹ When a number is the story, a large, clearly labelled figure can do more than any chart.

• Change over time: line or column chart
• Ranking: sorted horizontal bar chart
• Part-to-whole: stacked bar, or a pie with two to four slices
• Magnitude: bar chart with a zero baseline
• A single striking figure: a large number with a clear label and source

An infographic is mostly read through its words: the headline, labels, notes and source line. Draft them in a plain document first, and get them approved before design begins. This keeps the design team from working on text that will change.

Plain language guidance from the Australian Government Style Manual is a good benchmark. It recommends an average of about 15 words per sentence, everyday words, active voice, and putting the most important message first.² It also warns that jargon excludes people, so spell out acronyms such as SDG or WASH, or replace them with plain terms.² Round numbers where precision does not matter, use the same units throughout, and add the source and date under every chart.

Colour should guide the eye to the message, not fill space. Use one strong accent for the figure that matters and calmer tones for context. Your brand palette is a starting point, but it may need lighter or darker tints to work in charts.

Contrast is measurable. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines ask for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text.³ For the parts of a graphic needed to understand it, such as the lines in a graph or the slices of a pie chart, the target is at least 3:1 against adjacent colours.⁴ W3C's own examples show an infographic fixed by adding contrasting borders and dark icons on light backgrounds.⁴

Remember readers with colour vision deficiency. Datawrapper advises making colours differ in lightness, choosing blue rather than relying on red and green, labelling data directly instead of using a colour key, and adding a second cue such as shape, pattern or position.⁵

An infographic saved as a single image is invisible to screen readers and hard to search. W3C classes graphs and charts as complex images and says they need a two-part text alternative: a short description that identifies the image, and a long description that sets out the essential information it conveys.⁶

For a report or web page, place the key figures in the surrounding text or in a simple table next to the graphic. For social media, add alt text and repeat the main finding in the caption. For PDFs, tag the document so the description travels with the image.

Decide early where the infographic will live, and design for the smallest screen first. A tall A4 layout rarely works on a phone. It is often better to produce a family of assets from one design: a full version for the report, square or vertical cards for social media, and a print version with bleed for posters or banners.

If you brief an infographic designer, in Africa or anywhere else, share the approved message, the audience, the final text, the data file with sources, your brand guidelines and every size you need. Ask to see a rough layout before full design, and have someone who knows the programme check every number in the final file. Keep the editable source files so you can update figures next year without starting again.

• One message, written as a single sentence headline
• Audience and main channel agreed
• Chart type matches what the data shows
• Text approved in plain language before design
• Source and date under every figure
• Text contrast of at least 4.5:1, key graphics at least 3:1
• Meaning never carried by colour alone
• Alt text or a long description published with the image