The easiest thing for a reader to do? Stop reading.

In a world where attention spans are short and information overload is as common as breathing, most of us don’t feel we have the time, interest or endurance to wade through wordy, data-driven articles. In our era of infoxication, even bullet points are starting to toe the overload line and become a turnoff.

This explains why infographics have become the champion of delivering complex data in a way that’s clear, concise and compelling.

The infographic is where art meets science within the world of information. The following six tips will help you merge the two to create a remarkable, shareworthy infographic for your brand.

1. Define the point and stick to it. An infographic is not intended to be a spitfire of random brand ideas. It’s about sharing facts and data that support a single point. If you want to drive home a point about customer service, don’t share how much profit you made or how many toys you donated to a charity drive last month. Rather, every element of the infographic must point to your remarkable customer service.

2. Have a story that guides the information. Now that you’ve filtered your facts and determined the infographic’s main message, you can begin to build a story around it. Boring data leads to a boring infographic, so you’ll need to find information that helps you show and tell your story in a compelling way. A few questions to put you on the right path:

• What is the trigger that’ll get the reader to care?
• What’s the surprise, the climax and the resolution or takeaway?

3. Leave room for whitespace. Because infographics provide short bursts of information that readers need to process in sequence, whitespace in infographics is as important—if not more important—than whitespace within any other content forum.

4. Remember your target. What may be an interesting number or fact to you may not be interesting to the target. You need to consider how the data points will excite, wow and motivate them to read and share your infographic (or perhaps cause them to feel clicking through was a smart investment of their time).

5. Prepare your infographic for a long life. Will your infographic be outdated after a day? A month? A year? Be sure to select information that lasts or can easily be updated to make what is old new again.

6. Make it wall-worthy. When you think you’re finally ready to release the infographic to your target, run it through one last test: If you printed the infographic out and sent it to your target, would they hang it on their wall? If not, go at it again.

Infographic content is a win for marketers, generating more views, clicks and shares—both by nature and by design. The infographic not only makes it easier for us to retain information, it allows us to process information faster too.

For a glimpse into some of our infographic work, click here, here or here.