A Short History About Infographics – What Are Infographics?

Before you begin deciding what kind of infographic to create, whether that be as a preliminary sketch or when you start working in Illustrator, it is important to have a firm idea about what exactly is an infographic. You may already know that an infographic needs to somehow convey information graphically. But how can that be done? Before you can understand that, we need to look at how long infographics and logos have been around. You might be surprised, they have quite a long history over thousands of years and basically began as soon as humans started to combine pictures and a form of writing together to create instructions for other humans. Though they have changed in structure over time, some kinds of infographics that were used hundreds of years ago have translated well into the digital computer age and continue to be used by us today. The history of infographics or graphic communication is a very broad topic and in no way could be fully discussed in this book. However, in this chapter, I think it is important to present some key events, cultures, and people in history who played a role in the creation and progression of infographics and logos into the present day. In turn, this will give you a better understanding of how to build your infographics later in Illustrator, as well as form a vision of how your design should appear.

Note This chapter does not contain any projects.

A Short History About Infographics

I will now present a few timelines to explain the progression of infographics throughout history. Refer to Figure 1-1.

© Jennifer Harder 2023

J. Harder, Creating Infographics with Adobe Illustrator: Volume 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/979-8-8688-0005-4_1

Figure 1-1.  Pictorial timeline of ancient history to 1600 AD