To begin my infographic project, I first looked up several different infographic tools and evaluated them. I

researched Dipity, Easel.ly, Infogr.am, Visual.ly and Piktochart. I chose to use Piktochart because it has a “drag

and drop” design that makes it easy to create the infographic, and it has many pre-made templates that helped me

get an idea of how to put my infographic together. I rated this tool twenty-three out of twenty-seven because the

site is reliable, well maintained and has several examples of the product. I also really liked Easel.ly because of its

templates. I chose to make a chart on Easel.ly, screen shot it, and then upload it to my infographic on Piktochart.

            After choosing the tools I was going to use, I looked up information that I would be able to use to make the

infographic. Socialbakers.com has a lot of good, up to date information about all the big social media sites, and I

got a lot of great information from there.  I put all of the statistics and information on one word document and

wrote all the bibliography for all of my sources. During class, I made a simple layout on a piece of paper of what I

wanted my infographic to look like. During that process I had to take into consideration what Piktochart is able to

do and what kind of templates it has. This really helped me when I started making the actual infographic.

            Over the next few days I used Piktochart to create my infographic. The tool was easy to use because of its

drag and drop placement feature. I was also very happy that there wasn’t a delay when trying to move objects

around like there is when using Glogster. It made the project a lot less time consuming. I added text boxes, colored

rectangles, circles, and several logos and pictures to create my infographic. I had no problems getting everything to

line up perfectly because “magic lines” would appear and help me line up new circles with other circles. This is my

favorite feature of the tool because it helped me keep my infographic straight and orderly. My biggest problem

with the tool was that there was a limited number of times you could upload pictures to the tool. I did not know

about the limit until a notification popped up saying that I needed to buy the pro version of Piktochart to upload the

picture. This was very problematic because I hadn’t uploaded the chart that I made on Visual.ly or several other

pictures. I decided to save the infographic to my computer, open it in Publisher, and then add the rest of the photos

there. While saving the infographic, I learned that Piktochart works best in Firefox because I wasn’t able to save

my infographic while I was using Internet Explorer.

            I would use Piktochart again because it worked well with my infographic. I would be sure to only upload

few, very important pictures so I can finish the entire project without needing to add more to it in Publisher. I

enjoyed using this tool and I will use it again in the future.