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Information design resources

Here you’ll find a curated collection of tools, templates, articles, and ideas to help you design and communicate information with clarity. Whether you’re working on a data-heavy report, an engaging infographic, or an interactive chart, these resources are here to guide, inspire, and save you time.

I’ve gathered what I use in my own projects, alongside practical tips and examples you can adapt to your own work. Browse around, take what’s useful, and feel free to share with others who value thoughtful, well-crafted information design.

Finding useful datasets

Looking for reliable, well-structured datasets to jump-start your next data visualization project? Here are some of my favorite starting points:

Looking for more? Read our blogpost: Small datasets to practice your data visualization skills

Inspiration for data visualization

Digital tools to create infographics and data visuals

Inkscape tutorials

Learning how to create and edit vector images (rather than bitmap images) is one of the key steps in unlocking your full information design power. Inkscape is a powerful free tool to help you do just that. I personally found the following tutorials very useful, not too long, and to-the-point:

Illustrations and icons

Colours

It is undeniable that Lisa Charlotte Muth (Head of Communications at Datawrapper) is the ultimate expert when it comes to color use in data visualization. The list of articles about color on the Datawrapper blog is the best source you’ll ever find on the topic. In particular, the following articles are very worthwhile:

If you’re looking for tools and inspirational places that can help you create color combinations for your visuals, here are some of my favorites:

Typography

Creating graphs

Creating maps

Creating tables

Ethics in data visualization

Books about infographics and data visualization

Here are some of the books that were foundational for my own career path in data visualization and information design:

  • Data visualisation, Andy Kirk
  • Dear Data, Giorgia Lupi & Stefanie Posavec
  • Information graphics, Taschen
  • Infographic designers’ sketchbooks, Steven Heller & Rick Landers
  • Storytelling with data, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
  • The visual display of quantitative information, Edward Tufte
  • Trees, maps and theorems, Jean-Luc Doumont
  • Visual journalism, Gestalten
  • Visual thinking, Willemien Brand

If you’re looking for more, make sure to check our complete list of data visualization books!

People on social media talking about data

Videos about data visualization

Dataviz blogs and online magazines

Dataviz podcasts

These are some of my personal favorites. Looking for more? We have a complete list of podcasts on data visualization and information design!

Books on a bookshelf - infographics resources

Read more:

thumbnail for video 07 - 7 different goals for your chart

7 different goals for your chart

A crucial step in building a powerful chart is choosing the right type of chart. A lot of charts don’t work because they simply use the wrong type of chart. To avoid this trap, we must ask ourselves a basic question: what’s the ultimate goal of our data visual? What do we want to show with our data?

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19 December 2022

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Making a data visual noise-free

Removing noise from a data visual is not only about taking things away such as gridlines, axes or legends. That’s just one part of it, which we could call removing physical noise. Improving the signal-to-noise ratio is often also about adding little things that help our audience better understand the visual. We are helping them by removing mental noise, or mental barriers.

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12 December 2022

Three tips to create powerful charts in Excel

Creating charts in Excel can be a very powerful tool for making sense of complex data sets, and for visualizing them. But the default options are not always the most pretty or effective ones. Here are our top three tips to create better Excel charts.

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8 December 2022

thumbnail for video 05 - a powerful chart has a high signal-to-noise ratio

A powerful chart has a high signal-to-noise ratio

‘Less is more’. It’s a crucial principle in most of our communication, and in data visualization in particular. Because of my background as a physicist, I prefer to talk about the ‘signal-to-noise ratio’. The message - our signal - should be amplified as much as possible, giving it all of the attention. Everything that can distract from our message - the noise - should be removed.

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5 December 2022

thumbnail for video 04 - a powerful chart tells a story

A powerful chart tells a story

A powerful chart has a clear message. It should be short and meaningful, and obvious in the blink of an eye. If there’s only one thing our audience remembers at the end of the day, this should be it.

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28 November 2022

Navigating the landscape of powerful charts

Once we’ve decided to create a data visual or infographic, there are a lot of questions we should ask ourselves to determine the most suitable format. These considerations could include size, readability, possible interactive functionality, and the level of detail we need.

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21 November 2022

We are really into visual communication!

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