A picture is worth a thousand words – based on this, infographics would carry hundreds of thousands of words, yet if you let a reader choose between a full-length 1000-word article and an infographic that needs a few scroll-downs, they’d probably prefer absorbing information straight from the infographic. What’s not to like? Colored charts and illustrations deliver connections better than tables and figures and as users spend time looking back and forth the full infographic, they stay on the site longer. Plus, readers who like what they see are more likely to share visual guides more than articles.

While not everyone can make infographics from scratch, there are tools available on the Web that will help you create your very own infographics. In this article, we’re listing more than 20 such options to help you get your messages across to your readers, visually.

Read Also: The Infographic Revolution: Where Do We Go From Here?

What About Me?

"What About Me?" is a personalization tool that produces colorful infographics that display your social media habits automatically from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The tool is provided by Intel. Create an infographic of your digital life and become inspired by the people you know, the things you see, and the experiences you have online.

Vizualize.me

Vizualize.me allows you to create an online resume format that is beautiful, relevant and fun, all with just one click. It enables you to express your professional accomplishments in a simple yet compelling personal visualization, and will help optimize your LinkedIn Profile to get a kickass Visual Resume.

Piktochart

With Piktochart, you get to create an innovative Infographic using a combination of different types of visualizations: themes, icons, vectors, images and chart exporter. Drag-and-drop and click your way through color schemes, shapes and fonts, then export the materials as static or html to easily embed it for use at your site.

easel.ly

Easel.ly is a fun tool to create your Infographics with drag and drop features and a simple interface. You can easily create and share visual ideas online, supported by ‘vhemes’ or visual themes that help you get started from the preset Infograpic style. Drag and drop a ‘vheme’ onto your canvas to turn your idea into a full infographic.

Visual.ly

Visually helps you customize infographics in seconds, and no, you don’t have to be an analyst or designer to make infographics with Visually Create. Visual.ly allows you to also discover infographics and favorites from other users.

Infogr.am

Infogr.am is a simple yet most exciting way to create static and interactive infographics. Import raw data to Infogr.am, and the site’s online tool will help you turn that data into a nice looking chart or full-blown infographic in minutes.

Many Eyes

Many Eyes is an experiment by IBM Research and the IBM Cognos software group with a simple belief: ‘Finding the right way to view your data is as much an art as a science’. Many Eyes provides a range of visualizations from the ordinary to the experimental, where each can be put together with a click.

Venngage

Venngage is an online infographics tool that helps you create and publish custom infographics, and at the same time, engage viewers and track results. Venngage allows you to create beautiful infographics for blogs and websites and you can also watch the numbers of your audience grow with compelling and beautiful content.

iCharts

With iCharts, you can create great-looking charts in minutes with interactive and easy-to-share data. iCharts makes it easy to visualize, share and distribute big and small data.

Dipity

Dipity is a free digital timeline website, if you are looking for a different type of Infographics. The mission is to organize the web’s content by date and time. Dipity is the fastest and easiest way to bring history to life with stunning multimedia timelines.

Timeline JS

TimelineJS is a beautifully crafted timeline that is easy and intuitive to use. You can pull in media from different sources with built-in support for Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Wikipedia, SoundCloud and more.

StatSilk

StatSilk offers web-based and desktop software to make data analysis easy, efficient and enjoyable, to cater to diverse mapping and visualisation needs.

InFoto Free

InFoto Free is an app for your Android to create an infographic of your photo-taking habits, using a Photo stats analyzer. With InFoto Free you can create awesome looking high-res infographics from your photo collection. It tells you things like what time of the day you prefer to take photos in, whether you prefer horizontal or vertical orientations as well as your favorite city to shoot in.

Photo Stats

Photo Stats is an iPhone app that analyses the photos you take on your iPhone. The app generates cool and stylish infographics that shows how, when and where you take your photos from. You get to easily visualize your photo-taking habits and share it with friends.

More Tools

1. ChartsBin – An online tool to create your own interactive map instantly with no installation or coding needed, and you can embed the map in your own website or blog easily too.

2. Tableau Public – A free application for your Windows computer that brings data to life. You can create and share interactive charts and graphs, stunning maps, live dashboards and fun applications in minutes. Anyone can do it, it’s that easy.

3. Creately – Want to create beautiful diagrams in no time? Creately may be a good choice to use as it can be used across all sectors by individuals, corporate teams, developers, software architects, students and teachers alike for diagramming purposes.

4. Gliffy – Gliffy helps to easily create professional-quality flowcharts, diagrams, floor plans, technical drawings, and more. You can easily drag-and-drop your way through the makings of an infographic using the many shapes from an extensive library.

5. SIMILE Widgets – SIMILE is a free and open-source data visualization Web widget.

6. Tagxedo – Tagxedo turns words – famous speeches, news articles, slogans, themes, even your love letters – into a visually stunning word cloud. Every word is individually sized to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

7. Wordle – Wordle is a simple web app for generating “word clouds” from the text you provide. While the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text, you can also tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

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Working as a freelancer is just like any other business. You need to market your services to attract prospective clients.

I know many of you may be uncomfortable or too shy to sell even your own service. Unfortunately, you have no option. You have to get out of your comfort zone and start getting projects in. To get the “work”, you must first get the deal.

Well, let’s get to work.

Read Also: Roadmap to Freelancing – Part I

Utilizing Social Media

Thanks to the Internet, there are now many social media platforms for designers to start their networking efforts and receive attention. Sites like Dribbble, Forrst, Shadowness, UCreative and so on, or job board sites like oDesk and FreelanceSwitch are where you can find hundreds of freelance jobs.

Interestingly, in job board sites, you can select the projects they post there in accordance to your requirements, such as the budget, the location and your skills to streamline your choices. By utilizing the perks from these social networks you can connect to prospective clients and make new like-minded friends.

(Image Source: FreelanceSwitch)

The point I would like to say here is, to start getting the jobs you want, you first need to attract prospective clients. We do this by Networking, be it online or offline. Social media is only a tool to facilitate your effort, use it well to maximize its potential.

I won’t elaborate on how you can do this since we already have some articles on hongkiat.com about this. Kevin Harter has shared some useful tips on how to get more design projects. If networking is your kryptonite, Karol has awesomely explained it in detail in this networking series. While their advice are catered to specific areas, in general the art of networking shares the same principles.

Sending a Quote

All right, now that you have got some exposure after being active in the design community, finally you are getting some calls. You are so excited. You get your first call which typically sounds something like this:

Client: Hello John, we are from ABC Company, we are very impressed with your logo designs on site XYZ. How much would you charge for designing a logo for our new upcoming product?
Designer: Well, I usually charge for $1000 per logo, with 10 revision rounds, maximum.
Client: Thanks John. We will consider your price.

But most of the time, that’s where the conversation will end.

Why?

Well, from the example above, we can see that the designer did not give room for further negotiation. This is a disadvantage to delivering a price quote over the phone.

Remember that you are offering a design service, which unlike a physical product that can be touched and felt on the spot, is rather abstract and intangible. This is where it may be useful to explain your services in detail when sending a quote. When you get a call, tell the client that you will send them a quote and call them back them for further discussion.

There are many examples of quote templates you can find on the Internet, but here I would like to add some simple practical tips to help your quotation ‘appeal’ to your clients.

First off, in my opinion it is important to not just add up a list of services and prices in your quote, you should also give a fairly detailed description to let the client know of the benefits they would get.

Furthermore, you may dress up your quote creatively, like you can make it three pages consisting of the cover ― try to design the cover beautifully and make a great impression at first sight, on the second page it could be a list of your best design portfolio, and the last page can be your itemized service with the price.

A Little Negotiation

Well, not every deal will go smoothly. Often times the client will need you to renegotiate your quoted price and there is no definite formula to negotiate; this in itself is an art form. Sometimes negotiations can turn complicated and ultimately the client decides not to use your freelance service.

Though, there are some practical tips that you can apply to help you prevent this situation. I personally have applied this method several times and it has proven to be quite helpful.

The client usually and in general will question the price; they want to lower it as much as possible.

(Image Source: FreelanceSwitch)

In this case, I would give two options to the client, the first is the initial offer with normal price, and while the second quote is the price they want.

However, in the second quote, I cross out some services, such as reducing the number of revisions, exclude some website features or change the custom design with premium templates available on ThemeForest or WooThemes.

Then I would ask the client: Which one do you choose?

Here, we narrow the client to choose only one of two options. This stops further bargaining (and ridiculous questions). That way, hopefully, the client will see that a higher price comes with good reason, while a lower price would come with consequences.

Signing a Contract

After reaching an agreement, it’s time for you and the client to sign a contract. The contract will be very important to clarify the terms and conditions of the project you will be working on. The contents usually would cover the time, number of revisions, terms of cancellation, legal stuff and especially the payment agreed.

Having a contract will also prevent you from future problems during the process of delivering your service, such as when there is a clash in requirements or when a client is trying to renege on the project, or their payments. You can use the contract to break down your work into milestones, along with partial payments due from the client with each milestone achieved.

To prevent clients from not making full payment, put it down on paper that the final result will only be delivered once they have cleared the payment.

Summary

There are numerous contract templates you can find on the Internet, but you should modify them to meet your specific work and legal situation (based on your country).

Legal issues aside, in the next part of this series we will discuss how to tackle some common problems when you are working from home, so stay tuned to Hongkiat.com.

Related posts:

1. Freelancers: How to Deal With Insecurities
2. Networking Guide for Bloggers: Simple Roadmap to Networking (Part 7)
3. What’s So Great (And Not) About Freelancing
4. 9 Things You Should Know About Freelancing Full-time

When you are dealing with task involving images, there comes a situation where you find text or quotes on an image you wish you can just copy down to paste somewhere else. But the evident problem is, you can’t just copy text printed on an image, can you?

Rather than retype every single letter in the image, which won’t work if there’s a lot to copy, there is a way to copy text straight from images, use GT Text. GT Text is a freeware for PC made to help you extract text from images.

Copy text from images with GT Text

1. To start copying text from images, go to the GT Text download page and download the latest of many versions available.

   

2. When the download is complete, run the installer and proceed with the installation process.

   

3. Now when you are ready, run the application from your computer and the file explorer will appear. Select the type of image files you want to open, and browse the location. GT Text supports TIFF, JPG, GIF, BMP and PNG file formats. After selecting the images, click Open.

   

4. GT Text will open the image. Now click on the ‘Area Text OCR’ button as shown below.

   

5. With your cursor active, select the text area you want to copy and release the mouse.

   

6. Releasing the mouse will load a text prompt as per what’s highlighted, now click Continue to copy the text to clipboard.

   

7. Once copied, open your Notepad or any other note-taking application and paste.

   

Other Features

To copy every text without highlighting, simply press Ctrl + F and GT Text will extract all available text for you. Alternatively, you can go to Tools > Copy Text From > Full image to do the same.

The default language used is English, but you can add other languages too. To add other languages,

1. Go to File > Preferences.

   

2. Click on Add languages.

   

3. Select any language you want to install and click the Install button.

Conclusion

With this simple freeware for your Windows PC, you can now copy text easily from any image you like. Although there are not many functions found on the application, copying text from image is already a great help by itself.

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