Why image models get numbers wrong
Image models render text and digits as shapes, not as data. They produce labels that almost spell the right word, percentages that do not add up, and bars whose lengths have no relationship to the values printed beside them. The output can look finished while being wrong in ways a quick glance misses. Treat anything numeric or textual inside a generated image as placeholder art. Layout, illustration style, icons and the colour system are what generation does well; the content layer should be set separately in a design tool or in code, where every value can be traced back to a cell in the source.
Honest charts: proportion, baselines and icons
An infographic misleads more often through proportion than through false numbers. Bars should start at zero. Pie charts only work when the parts form a whole and there are few of them. Icon-based charts are the classic trap: if a figure twice as large is drawn twice as tall, its area quadruples and the difference looks four times bigger, so scale pictograms by area or repeat identical icons instead. Keep time axes evenly spaced, show the sample size and fieldwork dates beside survey figures, and never combine sources with different methods in one chart without saying so.
Cite the source on the graphic itself
Infographics travel without their article: they are screenshotted, reposted and quoted, so the source must be on the image, not only in the caption. Name the publisher, the dataset or survey, the date and the sample. In the UK, the CAP Code requires marketers to hold documentary evidence for objective claims before publishing, and an infographic used in marketing is a collection of objective claims. Keep a sheet linking every number on the graphic to its source, with the name of the person who checked it. When the data updates, regenerate the graphic from the sheet rather than editing the old file.
Accessibility: alt text, contrast and colour
An infographic is a complex image, so a short alt text is not enough: give it a one-line summary as alt text and publish the full data as a table or text alongside. WCAG 2.2 asks for 4.5:1 contrast for normal text and 3:1 for the graphical parts needed to understand a chart, and does not allow colour alone to carry meaning, so label segments directly and use patterns or position as well as hue. Red and green side by side fail many colour-blind readers. Define accessible colour pairs once in the studio's brand hub and they become the default for every generated layout.
Updated 25 September 2026