Online Lifespan: Halloween

There’s a section in my book, Cool Infographics , that focuses on an infographic design concept that I established called Online Lifespan . I designed the infographic, The Visual History of Halloween , in 2010, and it continues to be relevant 16 years later. It even outlived the client website it was designed for. The FrightCatalog company was acquired and their website was shut down in 2016! However, the infographic continues to drive traffic every year in October.

Online Lifespan is the amount of time that an infographic remains relevant to audiences.

From a designer’s perspective, it generally takes the same amount of time and effort to fill an infographic design with current, trending information as it does to include information that can have long-term value to the readers. In a financial sense, it costs about the same to design an infographic that will only be popular for one week as it does to design an infographic that will be useful to readers for a year or more. The infographic design will be roughly the same size, with a similar amount of illustrations, text, and data visualizations.

If the objective of the infographic project is to drive traffic and build links to the company website, you don’t want an infographic that will be outdated or forgotten a week after you publish it. Many designs can have significantly longer lifespans. The History of Halloween in Figure 3-10 from FrightCatalog is an unusual case. The infographic is a timeline of events that have led up to the modern day Halloween holiday, so even though its online lifespan will be many years, it’s mostly only relevant during the month of October. This actually works nicely for the publisher, an online retailer of Halloween costumes, because it adds visitors and traffic to its busiest month…every year.

Not a fancy or complicated design. However, it is easy to read, informative, and the topic and data are evergreen.