Photoshop for Entrepreneurs : Design an Infographic | Jeremy Deighan | Skillshare

Photoshop for Entrepreneurs : Design an Infographic

Jeremy Deighan, Online Instructor |

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6 Lessons (38m)
    • 1. Photoshop for Entrepreneurs : Design an Infographic

    • 2. What is an Infographic?

    • 3. Setting Up the Infographic Document in Photoshop

    • 4. Beginning the Infographic Project

    • 5. Adding Icons and Information

    • 6. Use Photoshop to Create Your Own Infographic


About This Class

Photoshop for Entrepreneurs : Design an Infographic

Learn how to use icons, assets, grids, and more inside of Photoshop to create infographics for social media and the internet!

Infographics are visual information that is easy to see and understand at a glance. They replace the long text form of regular information, and provide a unique and compelling way to get your ideas across. These work great on social media platforms such as Facebook and Pinterest because they provide a way for the viewer to quickly get the information and see if it's something they want to continue reading about.

In this course, I will show you how to easily create a simple common infographic that shows a step by step type of process. These infographics are wonderful to make if you need to show anyone how to do something in a particular order, such as baking a recipe or fixing a car.You will learn how to research common infographics, set up your Photoshop document, and then use grids, icons, assets, and more to create the infographic. Finally, you will be prompted to submit your image to the class for us to see!

More Courses in this Series:

Web Design Mockup

Product Mockup

Improve Your Profile Picture with Beauty Retouching

Object Removal



1. Photoshop for Entrepreneurs : Design an Infographic: hello and welcome to this project are in creating an infographic inside a photo shop. Now an infographic is basically a piece of design or artwork that portrays some information to the viewer. So instead of talking about that in written form or text form or in audio form, this actually has design elements. So it makes it easier for the viewer to interpret and understand infographics air. Great for social media, because attention spans are very short. So by using an infographic, you can quickly draw the viewer in. They can see it visually, the information that you're trying to present, and they don't have to spend a lot of time reading or listening to something they can just visually see that information represented Now infographics can represent a lot of different things. It can be numbers. It could be percentages or graphs. It can be timelines, all kinds of different things, any kind of subject matter that you can present in an informational form. You can design a certain style to show that. So we're gonna learn how to create an infographic in this section, and basically it's going to talk about how you were going to set up the layout for your document. How we use things such as color theory with, ah, similarity and uniformity to make sure that everything in the infographic looks the same and, well, basically, just design one from scratch, then also show you how to you. You can use some of photo shops, assets that they already supply to you too easily. Pop those in and add some icons in different graphical elements to your design, so let's go ahead and get started. 2. What is an Infographic?: before we begin creating our own infographic. Let's go ahead and take a look at some different types of infographics and the things that you can use with infographics. And you can see infographics are basically just a visual way of getting information or data across to the viewer. And when you're creating an infographic, you want to try to keep some type of uniformity and similarity between your infographic, um, images and graphics that you use, or logos or icons. And the way that we do that is we can do it with color. We can do it with shapes, but basically we want to try to keep it similar so that it just draws the viewer in and makes it likable and share a bowl. And that's kind of the point of the infographic to share information. But then, to draw people back to your business or brand and hopefully you're putting your logo branding or website on your infographic because, um, you know when people do don't do that, it's nice to share information. But you know, part of this process is to share this information in the hopes that people return back to your business or brand and try to learn more about you and what you have to say. So looking at some of these in the top left hand corner, you can see this one uses a pie chart and different graphs to get the information across the one next to it. Causes of antibiotic resistance uses six different icons, and they all have this circular feel. So again it's uniform and similar with the color choices and the shapes that they're using . Next to that, we have the differences between the artists and the scientists. That's a really cool 12 different versions of the same person using the same colors and styles. Next to that again, same colors and similarity going on here with a timeline. It's got this three d look and you can see these could be two D or three d. And there's some very interesting ones on this page. This circular one really draws my attention. It's got this cool look to it, a cool feel. They've got this nice color scheme going on here. I also like this one with the body and they're using time information to get that point across. But you can see that the colors corresponded the different parts of the body, and it's got a really nice feel to it. You can see there's, Ah, one with the how to do that. How not to do the Harlem shake. So there's, you know, funny ones. I've used this one before this color of motion guy. This is a cool infographic is showing what different colors mean, and you can see what the different colors mean here. And actually, what companies use those colors and their logos to try to get that point across? You can see some that have percentage percentages or numbers. Um, you know different states or countries that you could use. Here's the social media, once of the different uses of different social media platforms, so as you can see infographics air just trying to get that information across. But it's doing it in a nice visual way, and we're going to create a simple one in this course. But you can be a simple horse complex as you want to be. You just want to make sure that it looks decent, that it's terrible and that you know it has some kind of branding beside it so that when people are sharing it out there, it's always pointing back to your name or your business. 3. Setting Up the Infographic Document in Photoshop: and this course, we're going to create a very simple infographic. But before we make that infographic, we need to answer some basic questions. And these questions are, where is this infographic going to be displayed and who is going to be viewing it because it really matters to think about what audience is going to be viewing this, how they're going to views it, this infographic against your business or brand and where they're going to view it. So, for instance, are they going to view this on social media? Are they going to view this from your website? Is it going to be a downloadable that they can download to their computer? Is it going to be an image or PDF form? Where is it going to be? Something that they can actually print out and hang up in their room or office? And answering these questions will give you a good idea of what kind of dimensions you want to go with. Now, you know Facebook Post have a certain set of dimensions that you can post to versus a Pinterest post. Pinterest is great for infographics because they allow for these long images, and so you want to find out where you're going to be posting these and what type of format and mentions to use. Now. Another question that you might want to ask is. Are they downloading this from your website? If they're getting it off your website and it's a Pdf format, you pretty much are have free reign to make any dimensions that you want because they consume in and out of the pdf and move around and what have you and then also are they going to print it out? If they print it out, you're gonna want to try to stick within dimensions of 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper or legal paper or whatever common paper that is used now doing research. I found out that the most common ratios in infographics is a one by three or a wonder for ratio. So that means if I have a 500 pixel with image, it's going to be either 1500 or 2000 pixels long. Now that's a long image, and those were good for infographics because it kind of tells a story. It's a long image or documents so that as you read it you keep following the information down like a good advertisement or a good book. However, for simplicity sake, we're going to make a little shorter one. We're just going to make our infographic 500 pixels wide by 1000 long. It's still kind of along for men, it's a 1 to 2 ratio, but it will just keep it simple for this course. So go ahead and click on the new button and change our pixels 500 from 1000. And as you can see, it's still a nice long document. But it's not as long as 500 to 2000. We'd really have to fill up a lot of information, and we're just trying to show you the basics in this course, not create a full info graphic from scratch. So the first thing that we want to do is just kind of set up the document. I like to use grids with this sort of thing because it helps with snapping and making sure that things stay uniform and have good similarity. So let's go ahead and turn on our grid. I'm going to go to view show grid, and you can use that shortcut key there. And as you can see, this grid looks awful because it's using dimensions that we're not using. It was going to zoom in here, go to the top, and I'm going to go to edit preferences, guides, grids and slices. And as you can see in the grid section, we have a grid line every one inch with four subdivisions. Let's go ahead. Just make the subdivision's one so we can see what is going on here. And we have a grid line. Everyone inch well, that's not gonna work for us. First of all, we need be in pixels. Since we're working in a digital medium and one grid line, every pixel is a little too much. So we have 500 pixels wide. So we need to think about a number that would divide into 500 really good. So we could use 10 and that's still bit much. 25. That's not too bad. We could use 15. I like 50 because I like these nice big grid marks. And then we could subdivide this. I could use four subdivisions in this document, but that's 12.5 pixels, which is kind of awkward. Let's go ahead, Just make this five subdivision. So what that is saying is the big dark lines is 50 pixels and the small lines is 10 pixels . So we got 10 2030 40 50 10 2030 40 50. So that's nice and even easy to snap. Too easy to see and easy to work with. So it's hit, okay? And then we might want to use our rulers to so we can go to view show rulers, if this is showing, an inch is just double click on it. Go down to units, rulers, and change it from inches two pixels and then we can see our pixels going across. And this is great. So we have 0 to 500 then zero all way down to 1000 and you can see the rulers moving on the sides and the tops as I move it around. And rulers are just great for aligning things because I can click here and drag and make these little alignment markers and make sure that things air centering Even if I turn the great off, I can still see where I've made those adjustments and to get rid of these I can just use the move tool. Go until you see this icon with the double Eros and then just slide it back to the ruler and it'll go away. So now we kind of got our documents set up and ready to go. Let's begin creating our infographic. 4. Beginning the Infographic Project: Okay, so now we're going to go ahead and begin creating or Infographic again. This is going to be a very basic infographic, but I just want to give you some ideas that you can use when designing this. So let's go ahead and get started. The first thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead and subdivide out how we want this infographic toe look. So let's go ahead and turn on our grid and are make sure we have our rulers on here, and the first thing we want to do is subdivide this out. So I'm gonna click on the rulers at the top and drag a line down, and the first thing I'm gonna have up here is some stylized colored boxes. This is effect that I like it just it put these little color boxes at the top and bottom ties in the color scheme and also gives me a color palette to go with as I begin designing . So I got my color palette right there on the design. The next thing that we're gonna have is a big title right here in the center. These two blocks will put a big text title. And then after that, we're gonna have a subtitle, and this is going to say Step one. And this Infographic is going to be a step an infographic. So it's teaching someone how to do something in order. Step one, Step two. Step three step for Step five. Now, Like I said, infographics come in many varieties. You can have them numeral. They could be percentages. They could be time based or just provide a set of information. This one's going to talk about steps, so this will be Step one, and then we'll have two blocks of text that we could type in here. So step one blocks of text, and then it's going to say, Step two and then two more blocks of text and that that's just paragraph format, and we'll continue that on down Step three. Oh, hey, Step four happened was I grabbed above the ruler and dragged the window out of its dock. Yeah, almost did it again. Two more blocks and then this one little space right here. Maybe we put in our web address here, and then we want to go ahead and break these off in the blocks, so that will be one block two bucks. Three. These will be four color blocks or I'm sorry. Five color blocks and those five color blocks will correspond to the five steps. So this is kind of a mess, but we'll clean this up as we go along. So the first thing that I want is I want to add a new layer. I'm going to call this top colors. I'm gonna grab my rectangle tool. And I'm just gonna make sure that I have snapping on snap to grid and snapping on. That's good. Okay, let's go ahead, zoom in here and go to the top and we're just going to draw a rectangle and we're gonna pick a color. Now I can pick any any color I want. This should match your your business or your brand. But I'm just going to do this arbitrarily just so I can show you what we're doing here is not what I meant. Pick. Yeah, let's go down to the red and I don't know why. I always start with red, will do the right color, and then we'll do. Maybe we'll do like a teal ish green color and again. This is just a little stylized thing that I'm putting on this. Infographic. This is not necessary. But again, this is going to give me a color palette toe work off off that, Would you a purple as I begin working already. Have these colors figured out for me. I don't have to guess, And any time you can do that, it really helps out. You don't have to think is much while you're designing is the work's already dumb and done for you. And, you know, you might not like these colors. I'm not particularly fond of them, but I'm just doing this freehand so you can see what I'm doing here. Okay, so we got these these colors and was turned off everything here. And whenever I do that, I get these weird grid lines here. So I'm just gonna zoom in and out, and OK, so we have this this color thing now, um, it might be a little too thick. I don't know if I really like that. It's a little thick. I'm going to take that rectangle tool, and I'm just gonna go and snap up 22 grid boxes from the top. Eso I got the everything else selected. I'm gonna hit the delete key. Delete that out. Okay, that's cool. That that looks better. That's not so abrasive or in your face. I'm going to take that layer. I'm going to drag it down to the new layer option, and that's gonna make a duplicate. I'm going to call this bottom colors. Just gonna move it down. So I keep some order. Select my move tool. Grab it. Hold shift. So it locks it the constraints and dragged that to the bottom. All right, so there we go. Now, we got a nice layout. Kind of ready to go here. So, uh, weaken dio so many different things. Um, let's go ahead and change out the background. I'm gonna double click the background layer and just name it anything, and it's just gonna quickly unlock it for me so that I can get in here and start messing around, and I'm going to choose the dark background color. I've already got this dog silvery blue selected. That's fine. I'm gonna leave that there. I'm going to go to the foreground color, use my color pickle color picker tool and pick that dark background and just move it up a little bit. So it's the same color, but a little lighter. And then I'm going to select the Grady Int Tool, and I'm just going to click in the center and drag that out. And it's going to give me this cool little pattern that Ah, cool little color background, kind of silvery looking. But it's got some dark areas at the top and bottom. Make sure when you do that you've got the circular great and not the law ingredient selected. So that gives us a nice little background. And so that looks. That looks good. So now we got kind of a color palette going on here, and we've got our background so we can begin adding some text and start designing the rest of the image. So let's go ahead and put in a title here. I'm not gonna be able to use the grid too much, because unless I'm zoomed in because you kind of lose those lines. Since they were gray lines, I could go in and change it, but it gets a little lost, but we've already got everything subdivided out very nicely, so I don't have to worry about that too much. We know our title is going to go right here in the center. We have this great background, so let's go ahead and we'll choose a white and see how that looks. Maybe we'll do a light gray, but we'll start with white. I'm gonna turn off this grid, go ahead and save this picker text tool, and we'll just click somewhere in here for now. And I'm just gonna call this, um, big title and make sure that centered got my move tool, and it should start locking this to the center. Photoshopped illustrator. All these programs have gotten really good about locking things and force automatically. And then now I just need to pick a bigger font. That might be too big. Okay, good. And, uh, yeah, that's about center right there. And of course, I might want to change around this fonts, you know, to fix the branding and make everything look nice and cohesive. But I'm not gonna worry about that right now because I just want to move forward and and kind of show you the rest of the steps. So in the next section will go ahead and we'll start creating the graphics of the Infographic. So now that we kind of got this set up and laid out not seeing Yeah, I don't move that one step dance too big. I don't want it to go to the edges, move it up. I could even do you know, a title. And I might even But in a smaller subtitle below it so I'd probably say, um, the five steps toe, You know, um, losing weight or something like that and then have, like, a little subtitle below that that I've got, um, a little catchy phrase that I squeeze in underneath that. So that's a good start. We'll go ahead and stop it here, and then we'll go ahead and pick this up in the next section and will begin designing those graphics. 5. Adding Icons and Information: All right, let's go ahead and continue with creating this Infographic. Now, we kind of got the basic layout here, and we just want to go ahead and start adding the information and the graphics that we will be using so we can go ahead and turn back on our guides and are grids. Um, go ahead, do the guide so we can see what it looks like here. And like I said, we're going to have 12345 sections. And then, um, some information down here at the bottom congest be our website address or you are ill or what have you. So go ahead and create a new layer. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to create a a basic circle here, and, um, I can make this. I might want to divide this up. We can always move this around. That's a great thing about this but me Turn on my grid. Zoom in here, you're just gonna make a circle and snapping is on. So we maybe do something like that. And then I'm gonna pick the foreground color. And with the color picker selected, I can pick that red color, and I can fill in that circle. Oh, didn't have foreground selected edit Phil, Make sure foreground color is selected. Okay? And then what we're going to do is I am going to turn these off. We can see this de select, and then I'm gonna add a drop shadow to this. So down here in the layers, with the layer selected, I'm just going to click on this and I'm gonna pick, drop shadow and basically, I want you can change the angle that the drop shadows coming from. So I want the light coming from the top left and I want to make it a little harder. So I bring the size in, so it's not so feathered, and I don't need it spread a whole lot and just bring the distance. And so it's just got this very little bit of drop shadow, and that just kind of gives it a three d effect like it's standing away from the rest of the text. Now I'm going to go ahead and add another layer here, and I'm going to create another circle. This one, I'll just make a little smaller going to fill it, and then I'm going to take a rectangle start at the top of this circle and move it to where it fills in with this circle here. Probably about right there. Who dio. There you go. Okay. Stroked it and didn't fill it in in, um, redo that. I might need to trim this off a little bit. It looks like See how it's not really aligning just as I want it there. So I might actually need to just I couldn't taking Eraser. I can do this a couple of different ways, but easiest ways. It just kind of races points a little bit, Kind of blend that in. We do a hard eraser, and I could take my time and and make This is perfect, but just showing you some ideas of some different things that we could do here. So I've got got this kind of graphic set up here. I want to add that same drop shadow to this layer and move this layer below the layer we created before. So now we got kind of this three D effect going on both layers. But this one looks like it's sitting on top of this one and basically We're just going to do this and set this one up, and then we can duplicate this on down, and that's going to just give us that uniform kind of look that we're going for. Let's go ahead and take a look. Okay, so this is working out all right, and then I might have to go in a justice title when everything move it up a little bit cause it's getting a little too close to where we originally want that wanted this. But let's go ahead and group these two together. So it's like there's two layers and hit control G and can put those in a group. And then I'm gonna add some text. Make sure have the white selected, and I'll type in here. Step one and we can Ah, I'll make sure that I'm grabbing just the text there. That the whole group. Okay, so let's see here. I'm going to click on that text wise and not selecting just the text form here. It's me that text out of the group for a second. No, there's a short cut key that allow you to do that, but I forget what it is. So I just move it out of the group. Stick it up there. I can center it, move it around. Maybe maybe I want it center. And maybe I want it off to the left. I'm just kind of mess around with it and see how it looks. It might look cool over here, too. For now, I'm just gonna put um right here and the center and see how that looks. I'm going to move that back down into the group, and then I can just click on the group and I can drag that down and duplicate it. So now we have a copy of that group and return on my guides here, and then I'm just gonna hold shift and hit the arrow keys, and I can move that down into the next section, and then I can do that. You know, the five times to get that Exactly how I want that to look. So it's go ahead with the next one in the next one, and then the next one. Okay, so now we have kind of the layout going here that we like, and we want to change the colors on these. And of course, the text, so I'll go back to that first group and I'm going to click on Step one, used the text tool and change at the step to, and I could do that with all these. Now, if I go back to the layers that we created with the graphics, I can add another effects. And this time what I'm going to do is a color overlay, and this is going to change the color of everything on that layer. Now, as you can see, we have white selected and we want it. We want to make luminosity normal, so the blend mode should be should be normal. Ah, 100% on the capacity and then just pick the color that we want to pick. So I choose a color, and then I can go up here and select that blue color that we went with before. And I can do that on this layer color overlay, and I wish it would remain. Keep the information that we want, but it doesn't That's OK, so now I can just go through and do this with all with every every group here. So it's gonna do that real fast so we can see what this looks like. Step three. No, I mean, add another one there. Let me Ah, go ahead and delete this and change this out to step three Player color overlay Normal. And there's different ways you could go about creating these. You could fill them. You could create a meat from scratch if that's faster, you know, whatever works best. Like I said, I'm just trying to show you some of the basics of how you could create some different infographics. This is one that's pretty simple, and it just provides some steps, but it just has some uniformity and is visually appealing for people to read. So this one's not too complicated. You can make these a lot more complicated. And just by looking at some of the ones that we had before, you know that they can get pretty pretty complicated. You can even make them three D if you know how to use a three D applications. So okay, Step four and let's go ahead and change out the color here. Color overlay. Pick that orange color layer, two color overlay and then pick that orange color again. Oh, what happened with that 1st 1 something and must have had luminosity. And make sure you set that normal when you want to put the capacity to 100. I'm just skipping that step for now because it's 10 shea the basics here. Okay, we're almost here. Let me go ahead and choose this one. Step five. Okay. And go ahead and move up here so we can color pick these fix color overlay. Normal green. Okay, so that looks pretty good. And, of course, we probably want a spacey's out and move some things around. It looks like it's a little cramped up, so let's go ahead and add in some textural quick. And, um, we can duplicate that. My don't might want to do the texts when you do the first group so that you can duplicate it out very easily. But basically, I'm gonna come in here, and I'm just going to write some text. Okay, So me So this would be the main text of whatever it is that we're talking about. And, you know, of course, you'd wanna mess around with this and make this look good. But again, I'm tryingto do this very quickly so you can see how it looks here and probably definitely do this step whenever we create that first group. So I don't have to come in here and individually move these again. But that's okay. When doing this on my own for my business, I would probably spend a lot more time on it. And I am now, But this is just a little tutorial. Little quick course. Give you some ideas, maybe try to get some of that creative juices flowing inside. Just so you can, ah, come up with some good ideas on your own, Okay? And then the last thing we want to do is we want to add that little website at the end. Let me add some text year, cause I always wanna have, you know, the branding going on, and then I'll probably take all these and just move them down. Space amount a little bit. So since they're all groups, I just grabbed him together and put him in like that. Let me move. He's down. Just get the spacing to look a little better. Maybe something like that. Um and then, you know, depending on the text, I might space it's out. Move it around. Do some different things. And then one other thing you can do is you could put some icons in here if you wanted to just add a little more flair to it. So basically, if I go down to the creative cloud application with photo shop, I click on that, and then it will open up this application here, and I just type in icon under the assets category, and it's going to give me a bunch of different icons that I can use. And you can download this straight to your Creative Cloud account and then click on the little, um, toolbar at the top and click on Creative Cloud Files. It opened up the document. Word actually downloads all your creative clear up cloud files, and I can come in here and I can click on icon elements, and then I can open that up with photo shop. It will bring that into my Photoshopped file, and then what this does is it's got a bunch of icons on one document that I can use to drag over. So these were counted in groups of eight. So it's, um I think it's 888 a. So basically, let's see if I wanted to say this folder here. 12345 That's the 5th 1 over. So 12345 Let me just see. Yeah, that's the one. So I'm going to click on that. I'm gonna left click, hold it down and bring it over into my document. I'm going to drop it. I can move it here on my circle. And then same as before. Effects, color overlay. And then we can make that, um, make sure right thing going on here. I want to see it. Oh, yeah. Okay. It's working. I want to make sure I was working there so we can go in there and add icons to these little circles that we made and just get those centered up. I don't like that. One are probably going and change that, but basically, you can use those icons. Teoh, Just add a little more to this step. So that is how you would make a basic info graph inside of Photoshopped. Hopefully, that gives you some ideas. Use consistent colors throughout the whole thing, so it ties everything together. Use consistent fonts, use consistent icons, you know, don't use this type of icon and then pull in different icons that don't match. You want to have everything consistent and similar, and it just creates. Ah, nice visual appealing. Look to the infographic, but that's one way that you could create a an infographic inside a photo shop. 6. Use Photoshop to Create Your Own Infographic: okay. Now you should have a basic understanding of how to create infographics inside a photo shop . As you can see, there are a lot of different types of infographics out there that portray a wide range of information, everything from times to percentages, things that could be shown in graphs and any type of information that you want to show. So by now you should be able to learn how to set up a document. Foreign infographic. How you can use things like color or text or icons toe. Create uniformity with inside of the infographic in just some basic ways of getting around photo shop. And hopefully you learn some cool tips and tricks in this lesson. Now that we're finished, what I would like for you to do is create your own infographic design, save out the image and upload it to the discussions or projects area of this course. I would love to see what you're working on, and I'm always thrilled to see the students posting images of their own projects. It's also a great way for me and other students to provide feedback and let you know what looks great. Or maybe what's not working now. If you would like to learn more about me, you can visit my website at www dot jeremy deegan dot com. I'm always available to the students, so feel free to message me directly or send me an email if you have any questions. And if you want to start a discussion on anything related to this topic or anything else in the course, go ahead and do that, too, and I will get back to those as soon as possible. So thank you for watching this. Can't wait to see you in the next course.