As social-media platforms go, Instagram is one of the most visual. Though it is a natural home to photos, other types of visual journalism also have a place. As a visual data journalist at The Economist, part of my job is to produce the static charts that you see on Instagram. Each week we go through our chart output and pull out the ones we feel will work the best on our social-media feeds. A number of thought processes and factors go into making these decisions, including colour, subject matter, visual impact and complexity. Over time, we have formed a loose set of guidelines to help us optimise the content in our feed. These principles are especially important on a platform where people can easily scroll past content that doesn’t immediately grab their attention.

Keeping colours consistent

We want our charts to be recognisable as coming from The Economist, and to stand out in feeds. So colours and palettes are important — consistency with branding and style can really help people spot our charts among everything else out there. Our template uses Economist red (#EC111A for any true fans) as the main or highlight colour, with more subtle blues as the secondary colours. There are exceptions such as political charts which use party colours, or some maps where colours might have specific associations. It’s okay to be flexible when needed, as long as there’s a strong template to fall back on.

Top left: using red as a highlight colour to link the data with the headline; top right: avoiding red altogether and using appropriate political colours to avoid confusion; bottom left: using red as the dominant colour to reflect the trend; bottom right: using red as a highlight colour to pull out the interesting data

Rethinking the presentation

It can be tempting to try and squeeze a lot into a small space because that’s what the original chart (created for the print edition) does, but sometimes this isn’t possible or advisable. Our print charts are often small, though we have some scope to expand the size when we need to —but this isn’t the case with Instagram. So there are times when I have to think about what the main takeaway of the chart is and what makes it interesting. I then focus on pulling out the elements of the chart which show it in the clearest way.

Left: the original chart; right: the Instagram version with simplified categories

Knowing the audience

While our economics and business stories and charts appeal to our regular readers, Instagram is our opportunity to engage with a different audience who might not be aware of the breadth of our coverage, from books and arts to science and sport. Our Instagram audience also skews younger: 70% of our followers are under the age of 34, and over a quarter are under the age of 24.

Instagram lets us show newcomers to The Economist how diverse we are

Letting people “find themselves” in the data

Maps and rankings are popular as people like to see where their city or country lies within the data. Our liveability index is one of our best-performing data posts, as was a daily chart about English language proficiency and our write up of the latest Which MBA? ranking. Posts like these often lead to more engagement as people compare data with others and tag their friends, perhaps because the ability to find yourself in the data can create a personal connection with it.

Some of our more recent rankings

Sometimes the best chart is no chart…

Not everything will look good on Instagram. This might be because of size constraints, too much or too little data, a really complex financial dataset that takes a long time to understand — or perhaps it just looks a bit flat in isolation (yet works with the story). As much as we want all of our charts and maps to be seen, sometimes forcing them into a format they’re not suited for just ends up filling our feed with clutter. It’s important to be selective.

Maps and charts which didn’t make the cut. Top left: too much information; centre: not visually interesting; top right: too niche; bottom left: wrong shape; bottom right: not enough data

…but we’re open to trying anyway

Our communities editor wanted to post a table that we produced for a recent special report on India. I wasn’t keen, thinking it would look underwhelming and not work in the template we use. However, we tried it anyway and it ended up being one of our best-performing charts.

Left: the original chart; right: the Instagram version

Publishing charts on Instagram is still a relatively new process for us, so we’re still learning. We don’t always get it right, but finding out what doesn’t work is often just as important as learning what does. We’ve found that charts can outperform other types of content, but it’s important that we continue thinking about how we can improve the quality on our feeds. If you’ve seen something you love (or hate) on our feed or someone else’s, please let us know!

Helen Atkinson is a visual data journalist at The Economist. You can follow The Economist Data Team’s work on Twitter.