How to Create Infographics in Tableau

Tired of the same old bar charts and line graphs? Infographics are a powerful way to break out of the standard dashboard mold and tell a compelling story with your data. By combining key metrics with custom visuals and a clear narrative, you can present complex information that’s easy for anyone to understand at a glance. This guide will walk you through the mindset, building blocks, and steps to create your own beautiful, interactive infographics directly within Tableau.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

What Exactly is an Infographic (and Why Build it in Tableau)?

An infographic is a visual representation of information, data, or knowledge designed to present complex topics quickly and clearly. Think of it less as a chart and more as a poster. It uses icons, illustrations, and standout numbers to guide the viewer through a specific narrative.

So, why use a powerful data platform like Tableau for something often created in design tools like Canva or Piktochart? The answer is one word: interactivity.

A static infographic made in a design tool is a snapshot in time. A Tableau infographic, however, is a living, breathing report. Viewers can:

• Hover over data points to see tooltips with more context.
• Click on a category to filter the entire view.
• Drill down into specific areas for more granular detail.

You get the visual appeal of a custom design combined with the analytical power of a live data connection. It’s the perfect way to engage executives and team members who need the big picture without getting lost in dense spreadsheets.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Plan Before You Build: The Infographic Mindset

The biggest mistake people make is jumping straight into Tableau and "doodling" with data. A successful infographic is 90% planning and 10% execution. Before you drag a single pill onto a worksheet, take a step back and map out your strategy.

1. Define Your Story and Audience

Start with the core message. What is the single most important insight you want someone to take away from this? Are you showcasing the success of a marketing campaign, highlighting regional sales performance, or explaining the steps in a customer journey? Write this goal down in one sentence.

Then, consider your audience. An infographic for a C-suite executive should be high-level and focused on key performance indicators (KPIs). One for your marketing team can include more granular data about specific channels or demographics. Tailoring your story to your audience makes it instantly more relevant and impactful.

2. Gather Your Key Metrics

You can't show everything, so don't try. The power of an infographic comes from its simplicity. Identify the 3-5 most critical metrics that support the story you defined in the previous step. Everything you add should directly contribute to that main narrative.

Good candidates for infographic metrics are often:

• Big Summary Numbers: Total Revenue, New Users, Total Leads generated.
• Progress to Goal: 85% of Quarterly Target Reached, 110% of Email Subscriber Goal.
• Impressive Comparisons: 40% Increase in Traffic Year-Over-Year, X is our #1 Performing Product.

3. Sketch a Wireframe

This is the most important step. Grab a piece of paper, a whiteboard, or a simple design tool and sketch a blueprint of your infographic. A quick sketch helps you organize the flow and visual hierarchy before you get bogged down in technical details.

Your wireframe should answer questions like:

• Is this a vertical design? (Most are).
• Where does the main title go?
• Where will the one or two most important numbers be placed? (Often near the top).
• Which sections will use icons vs. charts?
• How does one section flow logically into the next?

This simple wireframe acts as your roadmap, saving you hours of frustrating resizing and rearranging within the Tableau dashboard later.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

The Building Blocks: Essential Tableau Techniques

Once you have a plan, you can start building the individual components of your infographic. Master these few techniques, and you’ll have everything you need.

Using Custom Shapes and Icons

Icons are the heart of infographic design. They replace boring labels and make your data instantly recognizable. You can download professional icons for free or a small fee from sites like Flaticon, The Noun Project, or Freepik.

Once you have your icon files (usually saved as .PNG with a transparent background), you need to add them to your Tableau Repository.

1. Navigate to your My Tableau Repository folder. It’s typically in your Documents folder.
2. Inside, open the Shapes folder.
3. Create a new folder and give it a descriptive name, like "My Icons" or "Social Media Logos".
4. Copy your downloaded icon files into this new folder.

Now, to use them in Tableau:

1. On a worksheet, drag a dimension you want to visualize (e.g., 'Product Category' or 'Social Platform') onto the view.
2. Change the Mark Type from 'Automatic' to 'Shape'.
3. Drag the same dimension onto the Shape property on the Marks Card.
4. Click the Shape box, then click 'Reload Shapes' to make your new folder visible. Select your custom icon folder from the dropdown.
5. Assign each member of your dimension to its corresponding icon. Voila!

Creating Big Ass Numbers (BANs)

Infographics demand high-impact numbers that grab the viewer's attention. BANs are perfect for this.

1. Create a new worksheet.
2. Drag the measure you want to highlight (e.g., SUM(Sales)) onto the Text property on the Marks Card.
3. Click the Text button to open the editor.
4. Format the number to be much larger (e.g., Tableau Bold, size 28 or higher) and use a prominent color.
5. You can add a smaller descriptive label below it directly in the text editor, like "Total Revenue This Quarter".
6. Finally, click 'Worksheet' > 'Hide Title' to remove the unnecessary worksheet title.

Working with Donut Charts

While some data purists frown on them, donut charts are incredibly popular in infographics for representing progress towards a goal. Here’s a quick way to build one:

1. Start by creating a calculated field with the value 0. Let's call it Zero. You can also just type MIN(0) directly into the Rows shelf.
2. Drag MIN(0) to the Rows shelf twice. This creates two axes.
3. Right-click the second MIN(0) pill on the Rows shelf and select Dual Axis.
4. On the Marks Card, you’ll now see two separate sections, one for each MIN(0).
5. Right-click the axis in the view and uncheck 'Show Header' to hide the '0'.
6. To add a label, you can drag your total SUM(Sales) to the Text shelf on the second Marks card (the circle).

Building a Simple Infographic: Step-by-Step

Let's put these skills together to create a mini-infographic that reports on website traffic sources. We already have our plan: a vertical dashboard showing total sessions, a breakdown by source using icons, and traffic distribution by device.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Step 1: Set Up the Dashboard Canvas

• Create a new Dashboard.
• In the left-hand Dashboard pane, set the Size dropdown to 'Fixed size'. Choose 'Custom' and set it to a vertical layout, like 800px width by 1600px height. This gives you a tall canvas to work with.
• Change the layout from 'Tiled' to Floating. This is critical as it lets you place elements anywhere on the canvas with pixel-perfect control.

Step 2: Add a Title and a Hero Metric (BAN)

• Drag a Text object to the top of the canvas and type in your title, like "Monthly Website Performance Summary". Format it to be large and bold.
• Next, build your "Total Sessions" BAN on a separate worksheet, as described in the previous section.
• Drag this worksheet onto your floating dashboard, position it just below the title, and resize it as needed. Hide the worksheet title by clicking the dropdown arrow on the object and unchecking 'Title'.

Step 3: Show Traffic Sources with Icons

• Create a simple worksheet with your 'Traffic Source' dimension on Rows and SUM(Sessions) on Columns to make a basic bar chart.
• Duplicate this sheet. On the new sheet, remove SUM(Sessions) from Columns. Change the mark type to Shape and assign your custom icons (Organic search, Social, Email, etc.) to the 'Traffic Source' dimension.
• Drag a Horizontal container onto the dashboard. Place your bar chart worksheet inside it, and then place your icon worksheet just to the left of it. This will align the icons with their respective bars. Add any formatting you want.

Step 4: Visualize Device Breakdown with a Donut Chart

• On a new worksheet, build a donut chart that shows the percentage of sessions by 'Device Type' (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet).
• Drag this donut chart worksheet onto your dashboard, perhaps below the traffic source section. Resize and place it where it fits best in your visual flow.

Step 5: Add Finishing Touches

• Use Text objects to add small headlines for each section (e.g., "Top Traffic Sources").
• Add short, sentence-long annotations to explain key insights, like "Organic Search continues to be our primary driver of new users."
• Choose a consistent color palette and apply it across all your charts. Keep it simple with two or three main colors.
• Add a small footer at the bottom with the data source details and the last refreshed date for context.

Final Thoughts

Building an infographic in Tableau is a mix of art and science. It’s about leveraging specific technical skills like custom shapes and floating containers to serve a greater purpose: clear, concise, and engaging data storytelling. By planning your narrative first and focusing on visual simplicity, you can transform a standard report into an insightful summary that everyone will want to look at.

While this process is powerful, stitching together data and building visualizations from scratch can still be time-consuming. That's why we created Graphed . It automates the drudgery by letting you connect your data sources in seconds and ask questions in plain English. Instead of manually building out each component, you could simply ask, "Create a dashboard showing total sessions, sessions by traffic source, and a pie chart of traffic by device type for last month," and get an instant, interactive dashboard that forms the perfect starting point for your analysis - giving you back hours to focus on strategy instead of report-building.