Infographic Design: What to Commission and What Actually Gets Shared

Let's talk about the infographics that live on Pinterest boards, get pinned to slack channels, and rack up LinkedIn shares months after they were published — versus the ones that got made, got posted, and got ignored.

The difference isn't budget. It's not even design quality alone. It's about what you commission and how the content was conceived before the designer touched it.

Infographic design services produce content that, when done right, outperforms almost every other content format. Visual content is shared 40 times more than text and links alone. Infographics specifically are shared three times more than other content types on social media. Tweets with visual content like infographics are 150% more likely to be retweeted. Those numbers are real — but they come with a catch: most infographics don't hit those benchmarks because they were designed to exist, not designed to spread.

This is the practical guide to commissioning the kind that actually gets shared.

Why Most Infographics Don't Perform

The single most common mistake in infographic design: commissioning the design before the content strategy exists.

Here's how it usually goes wrong. A marketing team decides they want an infographic. Someone pulls together a bunch of stats. They hand it to a designer. The designer makes it look clean and professional. It goes live. Crickets.

The problem is that the content wasn't built around a shareable insight — it was built around "having an infographic." There's a difference between information that's been designed and information that's been made shareable.

Shareable infographics have a point of view. They make a claim, tell a story, or reveal something that makes the viewer feel like they need to forward it. "Here are 15 facts about social media" is not a shareable premise. "The 5 social media metrics that actually predict revenue (and the 3 everyone tracks that don't)" is.

The design amplifies the content. It doesn't save content that has nothing to say.

The Four Types That Actually Get Shared

Not all infographic formats perform equally. These are the categories worth commissioning:

Data storytelling infographics

These take a dataset and build a narrative around it. The visual hierarchy guides the reader through a sequence: here's the situation, here's why it's surprising, here's what it means. Research shows that 65% of people remember information from an infographic three days after reading it — but that recall is much higher when the data tells a story rather than just presenting numbers.

The key is having a "so what" built into the design. A chart that shows market share over five years is data. A chart that shows the exact year when challenger brands started eating into the incumbent's share — with annotations explaining why — is a story.

Process and how-to infographics

Step-by-step content performs reliably. Audiences save it for future reference, share it with colleagues who need the same knowledge, and bookmark it as a resource. These work especially well when the process has a counterintuitive step, when most people get it wrong, or when the sequence is genuinely non-obvious.

The visual challenge here is making each step feel distinct and sequential without the infographic becoming a numbered list with illustrations. Good infographic design creates a flow that communicates order and progression, not just information.

Comparison and "vs." infographics

Side-by-side comparisons are among the most shared infographic formats because they resolve a question readers already have. "Agency vs. in-house design" or "Flat vs. 3D illustration for SaaS" — these formats work because they do cognitive work for the reader, organizing information they'd otherwise have to research themselves.

The design imperative here is genuine balance. Comparisons that are clearly biased toward one side feel like advertising and don't get shared. The ones that trust the reader to draw their own conclusions from honest data perform significantly better.

Research-backed original data

Publishing original research as an infographic is one of the highest-leverage content formats available. If you can survey your audience, analyze proprietary data, or compile data from multiple sources into a novel insight, the infographic format is how you make that research accessible and shareable. This is the format most likely to generate backlinks, press mentions, and sustained long-term traffic.

What Makes the Design Work

Great infographic design services do more than make data look pretty. Here's what separates high-performing infographic design from the forgettable kind:

Visual hierarchy that creates a reading path. A viewer shouldn't have to figure out where to start. The design should direct the eye: biggest element first, then supporting data, then context. Color weight, size, and whitespace all do this work.

One chart per idea. The worst infographics try to say everything in one frame. The best ones are modular — each section communicates one insight clearly, and the sections build on each other. This also makes the infographic easier to repurpose: you can share individual sections as social media crops without the whole thing falling apart.

Data integrity in the visualization. Pie charts that don't add up to 100%. Bar charts with non-zero baselines that exaggerate differences. Color schemes that make data harder to distinguish. These are trust-destroying errors that undermine even good content. Good infographic design requires a designer who understands data visualization, not just visual style.

Mobile-friendliness. Most infographics are viewed on phones. Tall, thin formats where each section works as a standalone crop at mobile width consistently outperform wide landscape formats that require zooming.

Want to work with designers who understand all of this? Book a call and we can talk through your infographic content strategy before a single pixel gets moved.

Briefing Infographic Design Services: What to Include

The quality of your infographic is heavily determined by the quality of your brief. A designer can't make forgettable content shareable — but a good brief can set a designer up to make shareable content excellent.

Your brief should answer:

What is the single insight this infographic communicates? If you can't state it in one sentence, the infographic doesn't have a clear premise yet. "This infographic shows that companies using design subscriptions produce content 4x faster than those using project-based agencies" is a premise. "This infographic is about design services" is not.

Who is the primary audience and where will they encounter this? A LinkedIn infographic for founders reads differently than an email newsletter graphic for design managers. Platform shapes format, and audience shapes tone.

What data are you working with? Provide raw data, sources, and any existing analysis. A designer working with actual data produces better visualizations than one working with placeholders.

What format and dimensions are required? Pinterest wants vertical. LinkedIn handles square well. Email newsletters need narrower formats that work at reduced width. If you need multiple crops, say so upfront.

The Most Common Briefing Mistakes

Treating design as a packaging step. The content needs to be finalized before design begins. Asking a designer to "figure out the layout" while the data and copy are still changing results in expensive revisions and a worse final product.

No stated goal. "We want this to do well on social" is not a goal. "We want this to generate 50 backlinks from industry publications" is. The goal shapes every design decision: format, visual style, level of detail, CTA placement.

Over-specifying the design direction. Giving a designer exact layout wireframes with specific charts specified before they've seen the data constrains the work in ways that produce worse outcomes. Brief the content and goals; let the designer lead the visual problem-solving.

Forgetting the off-platform version. Your infographic will get screenshotted, cropped, and re-shared in contexts you didn't design for. Build in enough visual modularity that sections work standalone.

How to Commission Infographic Design Without a Big Agency Budget

The traditional model for commissioning infographics is expensive: a research phase, a strategy phase, a design phase, multiple review rounds, and a final delivery. Great for complex projects. Overkill for the steady content cadence most marketing teams actually need.

The alternative is a service like Jamm — a design subscription where you commission infographics as ongoing deliverables, one at a time, each with about two business days of turnaround, with a senior designer who's already familiar with your brand. You describe the concept and content, drop it in the queue, and get a draft back for feedback. Revisions happen before the next request starts. It's not the big agency process, but for regular content production it's significantly more practical.

This is particularly useful for data-driven brands that want to turn regular data releases, survey results, or research findings into shareable content without treating each one as a separate design project.

For more on commissioning visual content that performs, take a look at illustration for marketing — a lot of the same principles apply.

The Bottom Line

Infographic design services are only as good as what you give them to work with. Commission the right type of content, write a brief that includes the insight and the audience, and work with designers who understand data visualization — not just visual style.

The formats that get shared all have something in common: they make the reader feel like they discovered something worth passing on. Your job as the client is to find that insight. A good designer's job is to make it impossible to ignore.

Ready to turn your data into content that actually spreads? Start your design subscription and get your first infographic drafted in about two business days.