Yes, I know everyone out there is a master at Illustrator and can create any image they want in mere moments. Ha! But why re-invent the wheel?!? There are a lot of cool free and pay collections of vector elements out there for re-purposing in your own creations.

First off, there’s one of my all-time personal favorites: The Noun Project. The simplicity of symbols convey a lot of power. The noun project usually has multiple versions of any noun you an think of. Some are free, some ask that you attribute the creator, and some are royalty-free for a fee.

If you don’t mind spending just a few bucks ($3-6 on average), head over to graphicriver and do a search for “infographic” or “charts”.  Sure, a lot of the packages are full of tacky design – but remember, these are just time-saving ingredients for your next masterpiece.

If you are more comfortable with Photoshop, there are also decent bitmap based templates:

Why did I save the free ones for last? Because they aren’t very good, to be honest. Most of the free templates I found include only the most basic of shapes.

Anyone have any other recommendations?

A list compiled by Brian Suda over at netmagazine.com. It’s a little heavy on java libraries – but I suppose that’s the direction visualization is heading. Still, you think basic tools like Illustrator, or BI software like Tableau would have made it in there somewhere.

FF Chartwell is an interesting tool for creating simple charts using font character sets. I’m not sure that this is really much easier than using excel or other charting software, but some people might find it more intuitive – but at $129 for the full set, it seem a bit pricey.

There’s a nice demo video at http://vimeo.com/41772735

The skilled designers over at datavisualization.ch pulled together this list of preferred applications, code libraries, and tools. Dig in! I wish I had time to learn them all. Sigh.

The design experts over at Duarte have released for sale a series of diagram elements, for use in creating presentations, reports, etc. The elements are well organized, letting you filter them by the type of relationship you are trying to visualize, number of nodes, and style. I have mixed feelings about these sorts of collections (Powerframeworks is another) as they are very similar to what is available for free in Powerpoint’s SmartArt graphics. And yet, whenever I browse through them, I always find something I haven’t seen before, or get inspired to mash a few designs together in a new way. If you have strong illustrator or photoshop skills, these probably won’t be of much interest to you. But if you don’t, and just need a quick diagram to drop into powerpoint with no fuss – these are a lifesaver.

Of course, the most remarkable thing about the list of datavis blogs, tools, and resources over at Daily*Tekk is that Chart Porn isn’t on it. Oh well. Can’t win them all.

As there were no actual charts at that blog, I will instead invite you to contemplate this sign: