In 2010, during the final weeks of June, I designed my first infographic. I had just left the comfort of a six-figure job in marketing for the unpredictable world of startup life. I had worked at startups before, but this was the first time I was truly venturing out on my own with nothing to protect me but a slim safety net of savings.

While my then–business partner and I had been working on launching our business for much of 2009, we had both continued working full-time jobs to keep us afloat. But in June of 2010, I took a leap of faith and quit my day job running search marketing for a directory of colleges. It was the first time that I could realistically dedicate my full attention to our business at the time, an e-commerce software-review service called ZippyCart.com.

ZippyCart was one of many websites we owned, and it was our most successful. We had launched it in 2009 and grown it to a sizeable monthly income as a review and affiliate website. Our goal was to create a handful of other affiliate websites and use content marketing to grow their audience.

I was extremely excited about what was possible within our planned business model. A world of opportunity was in front of me, but financial security—and the peace of mind that came with it—had been thrown out the proverbial window.

I had been the breadwinner of my household. Two years prior, I'd committed to a Seattle mortgage that secured me just 900 square feet of living space for an investment that would have bought me a nine-thousand-square-foot mansion in my hometown of Cleveland. The country was beginning to rebound from the 2008 financial crisis and the cost of living was going nowhere but up. With the weight of the world (or at least my family's financial livelihood) bearing down on me, I needed a disruptive marketing tool that would help grow ZippyCart into a worthwhile brand so that I could provide a reliable income again.

Enter the infographic: the one piece of content that I could not convince my previous employer to even test. I was certain that an infographic would help put ZippyCart on the map, and was willing to bet three crucial weeks of non-revenue-generating productivity on it.

A few weeks later, it was clear that the investment of my time had paid off in spades. The infographic, entitled “The History of E-commerce” (Figure AA.1), delivered more than a thousand inbound links to our website. We moved to page 1 of Google search results for multiple coveted terms, including our target key phrase, “shopping cart reviews.” We also saw our PageRank score increase almost overnight.

I was certain that I had mastered a new medium of content marketing, and I was hooked! I quickly jumped at the opportunity to create another infographic, this time on the topic of Google's PageRank methodology. My next infographic (Figure AA.2) took only a weekend for me to produce and led to two thousand inbound links!

I was on cloud nine and nothing could stop me. Infographics were my new secret weapon, so I quickly immersed myself in this burgeoning new world of content strategy.

FIRST LESSON LEARNED:BEING IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME IS LUCK,NOT SKILL

Fueled by an inflated ego, I began sharing my designs with more experienced entrepreneurs and industry experts. While some chose to remain impartial and offered positive reinforcement, others understood that silence or compliance would only hurt me. One tweet from a business leader I highly respected stood out above the rest and changed everything for me.

Rand Fishkin, founder and CEO of Moz (then SEOMoz), responded to my Google PageRank infographic with four simple words: “That's not an infographic.” Nothing more, nothing less.

With those four simple words, I was deflated. What did he mean—my design wasn't an infographic? I had combined images with text and sized the content in the same way other infographics were delivered online. What could I have possibly done wrong?

I considered shrugging off the comment. After all, with thousands of backlinks, I had hard data backing up my success. But Fishkin had made a name for himself by staying ahead of trends and predicting how those trends might impact content marketing best practices. I, on the other hand, had made a living following the advice of Fishkin and people like him. I wanted to dig in and defend myself, but I also wanted to heed the words of someone whose thought leadership had guided much of my marketing career up to that point.

After stepping away and reviewing the infographics (Figures AA.1 and AA.2), it became clear that Fishkin was right. They weren't infographics. If all of the text disappeared from these images, they would no longer make any sense. So how could the graphics possibly be depicting information? And yet, more importantly, how was it that those designs had led to so much success?

The answer, simply put, was that I was in the right place at the right time. Visual content marketing was very new at the time. In fact, from 2008 until early 2012, a marketer could use the word “infographic” to describe almost any piece of visual content and get traction for their efforts. It was because of this that I was stuck in a positive feedback loop—one that had just been throttled by a single tweet.

Fishkin was right. What I had released to the world as “infographics” were anything but. Instead, they were paragraphs of information juxtaposed with imagery that only made sense if you read the text. They were poorly designed and riddled with mistakes, and today they live on multiple lists of the worst infographics of all time!

THE WORST INFOGRAPHICS OF ALL TIME

Now that you've had a moment to look at the “infographics” in question, you likely see what Fishkin saw. If you don't, it's OK. By the end of this book, you'll be able to look at myriad types of visual content and quickly discern what works and what doesn't.

Sometimes you have to learn what not to do before you can truly understand how to change your approach and do things right. Because of this, in future chapters, I will reverse-engineer a number of designs to break down all of the issues within them.

These two designs, for example, taught me a great deal about what not to do when developing a visual communication strategy, while also helping to lay the foundation for the award-winning visual content that I will be sharing in this book. At a high level, here are just a few key takeaways I gleaned from my first two projects:

• Great visual communication relies on tools like Adobe Illustrator. For my first two projects, I relied on Adobe Photoshop because it was a tool I felt more comfortable with. Illustrator would have been a far better choice due to its agility and robust toolset. More on this later, but for now it's important to note that Photoshop should be used to color-correct and adjust photos, just like its name implies.
• A reading assignment is not an infographic. If you have to read the text to understand the visuals, it's not true visual communication.
• Stock imagery is not the answer. Great visual communication relies on a skilled illustrator creating custom design, not a mix of stock illustrations and imagery.
• A strict process should be followed to create great visual content. Without one, you cannot predict timelines, let goals guide decisions, or deliver a narrative that speaks to your target audience.
• Great visual content takes time—but not forever. One weekend and three weeks are both incorrect timelines to develop this type of content.

These points, and more, will be explained in-depth in part 2 of this book.

MOVING FROM BAD TO KILLER

So how did I go from developing bad infographics for a completely different business to building one of the country's leading visual communication agencies? Partly by accident, to be honest.

Within a month of my Google PageRank infographic, ZippyCart was still benefiting from the associated marketing campaign. If this was the success of a bad design, what could happen with a good one? My business partner at the time was wondering the same thing. In fact, he, more than me at the time, saw the power of infographics and wanted to capitalize on them.

It was because of this that, one August morning of that same summer, he came to me with a domain name and an idea. KillerInfographics.com would be the go-to destination for visual content online. The plan was to create a directory of infographics and provide reviews to build credibility into the directory. This site would then bolster our main business model and add to our portfolio of websites.

Having an SEO background, I added another domain to the idea: SubmitInfographics.com. At the time, Google ranked websites higher in their search engine results pages (SERPs) if the domain name matched the keyword query. We found that “submit infographics” was a highly searched phrase and quickly scooped up the domain. Within a few hours, we had a WordPress site up and running, complete with an automated submission tool, and dubbed it “Submit Infographics by Killer Infographics.”

Within a few weeks, I had immersed myself in the hundreds of infographics and motion graphics that were submitted to our site. By reviewing a robust and diverse set of visual content, best practices and patterns began to emerge. It was clear that this was an industry begging for guidance and fraught with internal conflicts between the marketers wanting to capitalize on visual content and the designers asked to deliver it.

I realized that Submit Infographics could be more than a directory of designs. We were uniquely positioned to be thought leaders in a new industry, but in order to do so, we would need to build a better brand. With Killer Infographics, we could define standards for infographic design and lead the conversation in visual communication. I knew we were onto something, but I couldn't yet predict how that would manifest into a business.

ENTER KILLER INFOGRAPHICS,THE AGENCY

At the end of September of 2010, I found clarity. In response to a bad review, a Submit Infographics customer emailed us with a challenge. Their sentiment was simple: they felt that we were hiding behind a screen and a review site and needed to get down off our high horse, so to speak. If we thought we could do better, then they wanted us to prove it, so they offered to pay us to design an infographic for their company.

Immediately, I accepted the challenge. The customer provided me with clear research and gave me an opportunity to put my newly identified best practices to the test. I knew I could produce a great design with the foundation they laid for me, even if the money they offered us wasn't much.

The resulting design was such a success that the customer asked if we had the capacity to take on more work. This presented a unique conflict: our business model was not created to take on clients and offer a subjective service. In fact, this direction was the antithesis of what we had set out to do when starting a company. Our goal had been to create content for ourselves, not for clients.

At the same time, however, that original business model was not working out. By pivoting to design services, I was certain we could buy ourselves some time for our other websites to move up in SERPs and start generating more revenue. As a result, I convinced my business partner that we could do both. My passion for visual communication was only growing. With infographic design, I saw an opportunity that I couldn't walk away from, even at the risk of my business partnership.

We began by hiring freelancers, a practice that is still common among design agencies, but one that we avoid today. (In part 3 of this book, I'll explain the differences between freelance and in-house design and how these options impact your visual content.) But back in 2010, when I was still testing a new business model, starting with freelance designers was ideal.

In the final quarter of 2010, we landed a few more clients and designed fourteen infographics. We moved out of my then–business partner's townhome office and into a commercial space that could squeeze in five desks. We filled the space with writing interns, focusing their attention on ZippyCart, because we still believed that that would remain our core focus.

But during the first quarter of 2011, it became impossible to juggle both. In that quarter alone, we designed nearly 140 infographics! To keep our eye on the original prize, my business partner kept much of his focus on ZippyCart; meanwhile, I switched much of my attention to Killer.

I threw all of my time into Killer's needs, which included account management, project management, research, art direction, and taking on designs when a freelancer fell through. By touching every part of the process, I continued to hone best practices and learn from past mistakes. This, in tandem with valuable insight from our freelancers, helped to inform the foundations of the process we still follow today.

By June of 2011, we had designed nearly four hundred infographics and began making a name for ourselves. A full year had passed since I took the leap of faith that set me in motion to grow my own business. In just twelve short months, the business I had originally planned for was no longer my focus. Instead, I had experienced a fast and reactive pivot into a very unexpected space.

In the coming years, I would change our company name to Killer Visual Strategies (reflecting a suite of expanded offerings), run visual strategy for some of the world's largest brands, and speak at more than 175 conferences around the globe on the subject of visual communication.

But in June of 2011, I wasn't yet aware of how this new venture would change my life. I still felt just as excited as I had a year prior. I had a world of opportunity in front of me, but so much—including my financial stability—hung in the balance. Only one thing was certain: a year of leaning into my mistakes had brought me further than expected, and there was still so much to learn.

This world of opportunity now lies in front of you. In the coming chapters, I'll share a decade's worth of mistakes and the subsequent lessons learned. More importantly, I'll explain how you can apply those lessons and build upon the killer visual strategies that lead the industry today.