The Quicken Loans Skip-A-Year Mortgage Sweepstakes | An infographic by the team at Quicken Loans Racing

This infographic was submitted to us by Quicken Loans Racing.

This infographic is organized pretty clearly, and the message is obvious: what if you didn’t have to pay your mortgage for a year, and what could you do with that money instead? There’s some data viz and a lot of numbers to digest, but the text is kept low and the design clean enough to follow it.

I do wish the “How Could $14,160 Impact Your Financial Future” section was a little more to-the-point, though. It shows how much average debt is, how much all Americans owe, and how long it would take to pay that all off, but there’s no simple correlation to show how much of the average debts would be paid off by not paying mortgage for a year! Looks like it would pay off 53% of the average student debt, 81% of the average car loan, and 91% of the average credit card debt. And instead of showing how many minutes of work it would take to pay off the whole thing, maybe how many minutes or hours of work you’d have left to pay it off afterward? Something to bring the correlation between those numbers and the money/time saved even closer.

I’m also a little unclear on the stacks of money being used as data viz. Without a key, I can’t determine what one stack of money stands for, so I don’t see the relationship between the money and the number. $26,682 has 12 stacks of money (3 stacks, 5 stacks, and 1 stack), $17,433 has 10 stacks of money and $15,587 has 9… That means each stack of money represents, respectively, $2,223.50, $1,743.30, and $1,731.89. Consistency is important for the most effective data viz, so that readers don’t have to examine too closely to get the takeaway.

In all I’d give this infographic a B-. It’s clearly laid out and has a good overall message, but could use a bit more examination to the most effective points of comparison and the most effective use of data viz.

This infographic was submitted to us by RateSupermarket.ca

The information here is really valuable (literally!) and well organized. It shows a very clear way to save a substantial amount of dough on your mortgage over time, and there’s tons of data to support just how worthwhile it is to take these steps. There are just a few spots where adding extra data viz or illustration could save some text.

While I wouldn’t say this IG is text-heavy, the font size and the fact that all the text is in caps make it feel a little overbearing in places. One quick way to cut that down in each section: “Total Interest Saved” and “Your Savings” give the same information, and the “Your Savings” section is much cuter (look at that lovable owl!), so I’d suggest cutting out “Total Interest Saved.”

The 18% of Canadians who’ve made a lump sum payment isn’t actually visualized–it’d be better to see it as a pie chart, or maybe as 1 out of 5 Canadians (the owls again?). Plus, the visualizations for 2 years saved on rapid payments and 1 year saved on lump sum payments are the same–maybe there should be 2 calendars for the rapid payments.

The thing to take away from this is that these are mostly very picky critiques! Overall, this IG is clear, concise and to the point. It is a clear sales pitch, which in general is best to avoid with infographics, but people looking to save money on mortgages probably don’t mind when they’re being shown how much money they stand to save.

I’d give this infographic a B: take out the repetition, boost the data viz a bit and maybe include some general information on Canadian home buyers (how many homeowners? average age? fastest-growing province?) to offset the salesy feel.

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This looks nice and has some good information, and the overall design and color scheme is put together well. Although this looks nice, there is basically nothing about this that qualifies it as an infographic, so I give it a D-. There is no data visualization here. It is all text presented in colorful boxes that give the illusion of this being an infographic. The only part that has remotely any data visualization is the bar that shows a monthly payment breakdown. All I can suggest to improve this is to completely re-design it; as it is I would say it is about 50 percent of an infographic because the information is there, but the graphics are not.

The viewers of this have to read everything to get the data, and although the design is easy on the eye, none of the data is represented visually. A mortgage payment is a very technical topic for an infographic, so I realize it is hard to represent all of the data with graphics. But since there are lots of numbers and percentages involved, there could at least be some graphs or pie charts on here to compare some of the data visually. There should be some images to go along with captions, too. For example, there could be a picture of a house with a dollar sign on it next to the part that says “price of home”. The bottom part about PMI would be much more effective if the numbers were presented all together in a line graph, so that viewers could compare actual costs of a home for the different PMI percentages.

All in all this looks nice and has a lot of good information, but it needs a whole lot more data visualization to be considered a good infographic.