Hi all,

I'm a political activist of sorts who wishes to produce some info graphics, for example, United States with 10% world population and the most incarcerated people of any country, for use in campaigns, informational materials, etc. I have some modest experience with Excel charts and Word and Photoshop Elements, but none in dedicated graphics programs as such as Inkscape, AI, CDraw, Xara. Nor do I have any formal training in graphic design. My impression after looking at Inkscape and others is that these programs are quite complex. I'm trying to come to grips with my impulse to do something socially useful versus my concern that these programs require an awful lot of practice and learning. My question is, based on the kind of infographics I mentioned above, what would people recommend for software? Might there be something simpler for a user like me.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Welcome aboard!

It's mostly opinions.
Inkscape has an easier to use interface compared to illustrator, but doesn't have an easy time with cmyk mode saving, so bad luck if you are keen on exact colour matching.
In my opinion not the tools are complex, but how you can use them to make your drawing can be complex.
If you want these infographics to have alot of unique graphical elements, then inkscape is the perfect choice
-open source, produces svg, that can be read even with a notepad.
If you want something more letter based, some may suggest scribus -though I never used it.

For someone who knows little to nothing about any kind of computer graphics (raster or vector), I think Inkscape (a vector graphics editor) is much easier to learn than raster graphics programs. Because for such a beginner, Inkscape is like using crayons and paper. You can just draw like on paper, and move things around. (I'm using very simple, and not proper terminology.)

In raster graphics, you can also draw like on paper....sort of. But as soon as you try to move something, it leaves a hole in the image! So I think Inkscape is more intuitive than raster graphics.

It sounds like you are talking about using text (for sure), and maybe importing some pre-existing images, such as maps(?) or maybe drawing them. For those tools, for the drawing part, vector and raster would be about the same. But with vector graphics (Inkscape) you'll be able to move things around and re-position them, if you didn't get it quite right when drawing. So I think for this kind of project, you'll be better off with Inkscape.

If there is going to be a whole lot of text, like several paragraphs, like maybe for a brochure kind of format, you might want to consider Scribus, which is an open source desktop publishing program, which can also work with SVG as well. If it's going to be more text than image, you might want to think about using Scribus for the text, and import any images you might draw with Inkscape.

PS -- Lazur makes a good point about CMYK support. CMYK is a print color model (which I know makes no sense to you at the moment). But the point is that if you want to make a poster, or brochure, which might be reproduced, professional printing like that would probably require the CMYK color. Inkscape does have an extension, but I think it only outputs PDF or TIFF. So Inkscape is a little limiting as far as professional print reproduction. But definitely Inkscape should work fine, as long as you find a professional printer who will accept those formats.