Infographics have become an important marketing vehicle on the web. Most everyone is familiar with the concept, it goes back to the old print publication technique found frequently in Time and Newsweek and even local newspapers. In short, an infographic boils down all the essential elements of a story or message into an eye-catching graphic that has few words and is contained usually on one page.
In this internet-age, they are very much the same in how they look, the difference is more in how they are delivered. Infographics are often designed with a very broad/open copyright position (see
creative commons). By opening the infographic to the public domain the creators hope the bloggers, web content authors, tweet-ers, news-aggregators and such will use the infographic in their content and the message will be pushed out organically to their audience, sometimes called, "going viral".
Take a look at a few infographics...
juststand cause campaign from Ergotron (the company I work for);
infonewt an infographic marketing group and a
money blogger.
