Visual conventions get tired faster than design teams realise. The infographic clichés below were fine in 2018, looked dated by 2022, and now read as “this brand hasn’t updated their content engine in three years.” Worth weeding out of your next commission.
1. The flat-illustration genericperson
The mid-2010s “Corporate Memphis” / Alegria style. Tall, thin, geometrically simplified figures with disproportionately small heads doing abstract corporate things. Use instead: photography, real product UI, abstract geometric shapes that don’t try to depict humans, or invest in custom illustration that looks like nobody else’s.
2. The “did you know?” number stat
“Did you know? 73% of CIOs are evaluating multi-cloud strategies.” The “did you know” framing reads as listicle-bait, undermines the statistic’s credibility, and dates the piece. Use instead: just state the finding. “73% of CIOs are evaluating multi-cloud strategies — up from 41% in 2024.” Source-cite. Move on.
3. Decorative isometric illustrations of office life
The 30-degree-perspective renderings of laptops, plants, coffee cups, and “abstract data flows.” Filler that takes design budget without adding meaning. Use instead: nothing. Whitespace is a valid design choice. Or use the space for an actual data visualization.
4. The icon-per-bullet-point treatment
Every bullet gets its own decorative icon, regardless of whether the icon adds meaning. Use instead: a single representative icon per section header at most. The bullets carry their own weight or they don’t belong.
5. Word clouds
Always wrong, never right. They look quantitative but communicate nothing measurable. Use instead: a horizontal bar chart of frequency, or a structured table with counts.
6. The “iceberg” diagram
“What you see vs. what’s underneath” — applied to literally any concept where two layers exist. The metaphor was strong once; it’s now visual cliché. Use instead: nested layers shown as concentric rectangles, a stacked bar that visualises the proportion explicitly, or a side-by-side comparison.
7. The “vs” battle layout
Two columns, “Option A” on the left, “Option B” on the right, dramatic vertical rule between. Reads as advertising, not editorial. Use instead: a single comparison table with rows = dimensions, columns = options. More information, less posturing.
8. Gradient fills on bar charts
The gradient implies a continuous variable across what’s actually a categorical comparison. Looks “designed”; reads as misleading. Use instead: flat fills. Use colour intensity to encode an actual continuous variable, not as decoration.
9. The “thought bubble” illustration of a CEO/customer thinking
“Here’s what your customer is really thinking…” with a comic-book thought bubble. Patronising; presupposes you know what other people think. Use instead: direct quotes from research, with attribution. If you don’t have direct quotes, you don’t have the basis for the claim.
10. The growth-curve hockey stick on a slide titled “Growth”
An aspirational curve with no axes, no data, no scale. Decorative — and the audience knows it. Use instead: the actual growth chart with real data and axes. Or, if you don’t have real data, say what you’re projecting and on what assumptions. Aspirational hockey sticks without data signal that the team doesn’t have the data.
The general principle
Most of these clichés are decoration masquerading as communication. The studios in our directory share one trait: they treat every design choice as either communicating something specific or being cut. If you’re commissioning infographic work, ask the studio to defend each element — what does it communicate, why is it there? Studios who can answer fluently produce work that ages well.
Browse the shortlist or get matched with vetted studios.