Baby Proofing Your Home – An infographic by the team at Baby Care Journals

This infographic was submitted to us by Baby Care Journals.

There are a lot of indispensable tips here for ensuring that your home is ready when your baby gets moving. The illustrations are all very helpful in showing expectant or new parents exactly how these safety tips can be enacted around their home. Although it shares a lot of information, it’s also not too long — so it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to get all of the info.

That said, this graphic could use a bit less text throughout. While it’s important to properly explain why/how to babyproof the home, with so many tips included it really gets heavy quickly. There are a lot of easy places to cut just a few words — and it really makes a world of difference. For example:

“Place covers [or sliding plates] over unused outlets[;] Use outlet covers or sliding outlet platesinstead of avoid [choking risks like] outlet plugs, which can pose a choking risk.”
or
“Don’t hang shelves or artwork directly over baby’s crib for obvious reasons.”

It would also be nice to see more numbers/statistics. Although morbid, numbers on this topic really would help to prove the point. For example, the stat about 2,000 children ages 14 and under dying annually is a good stat to help prove that proofing your house is really important. If there are similar numbers about how many children die or are injured from a few of the specific rooms/appliances mentioned (the stat about drowning is a good example), it would be impactful to include them.

In all I’d give this infographic a B — great info, good visual connections to the tips, but some more data and less text would bring it up considerably.

This infographic was submitted to us by Serious Supplements.

Although this provides a “point/counterpoint” argument regarding the safety and legality of DMAA, it is all “info” and no “graphic.” In essence, it’s text pasted onto a background, with no visual context or reference. It’s also devoid of hard numbers to help back up either argument. So, although there are no especially heavy instances of text in the infographic, the text appears heavy-handed anyway — because it’s all there is to look at.

Additionally, some typographical errors detract from the messaging of the infographic. For example, the first argument uses inconsistent title casing on both the “No” and “Yes” arguments. In the “No” argument, “harmful” is for some reason uncapitalized, while “Safe” is capitalized in the “Yes” box. The first instance of the word “is,” however, is missing from the “Yes” argument. This type of error is repeated in the second “Yes” argument.

Proofreading your infographic is a critical step to upholding your image online. In ideal circumstances, the infographic will be shared and critiqued across the web — bearing your company name and/or logo. Having a less-than-polished product linked to your name just isn’t great for business, whether that product is your website, a flyer, an email, an infographic, or anything else.

In all I’d have to give this graphic a D-. It doesn’t really end the debate with a decision — “The Answer” is that the “Yes” side argues “Yes” and the “No” side argues “No” — and there is neither illustration nor data visualization. There also isn’t any data to be visualized, and the text throughout contains errors. One would need to restart this infographic from the beginning to get it into shape.

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This infographic about playground dangers comes to us from the folks at Lyslaw.

I like the overall design and color scheme of this infographic. The colors and images work well with the topic and it is not too cluttered or text heavy.

Overall I give this a C-, mainly because, although there is a good balance between text and graphics, the images used don’t really represent data visually in most cases. For example, a picture of some monkey bars doesn’t show me that 67 percent of reported playground injuries involve falls or equipment failure. This would be better represented if there was an illustration of a kid falling off of the monkey bars or one of them breaking. Another example is the dog toy doesn’t show me that 20 percent of playground injuries are not recorded. Basically the images need to more directly represent the statistics that the text provides in this infographic in order to create more data visualization. The pictures look nice and are all playground related, but they just don’t add much to the information.

I would suggest that every picture on this gets changed or replaced to reflect the statistics. The big pink playground set is supposed to reflect the fact that 8 percent of reported incidents involve hazards around the equipment but not the equipment itself, so there should be a picture of something other than a playground set, like maybe a kid running into a tree or something. I could make suggestions for each one of the statistics, but you get the point.

This looks nice and held my attention and I was glad that I didn’t have to read a lot, but in order for me to give it a higher grade, the graphics need to be more linked with the data to create more data visualization and tell the story that this infographic is trying to get across.