At first glance, Easel.ly seems like a winning ticket to the chocolate factory for the person who shutters at the thought of learning Photoshop—and don’t get me wrong, it is, kind of. The person who cringes at the thought of learning a new program like Photoshop fears uncertainty, and Easel.ly doesn’t exactly deliver that person to shore.
A quick review: Easel.ly is a website that tries to make the task of creating an info-graphic easier than assembling one from scratch with the use of a program like Photoshop. It’s similar to that of Wordpress, which allows its users to create a page without needing to know HTML. Rather, these two sites function much like an input-output machine generating content the user desires with templates and icons to piece together a finished product.
Easel.ly bases its ease of use on the drag and drop component, which works incredibly well, because it’s visually intuitive and requires little to no new learning. It also bases much of its interface on programs people are used to using like Microsoft word. All the tools appear at the top and there are only six of them.
Easel.ly does set the user at ease with predesigned templates called “Vhemes.” If an info-graphic needs to be created quickly, someone could use a Vheme and just change the text along with a few other minor adjustments and be done. Otherwise, starting from scratch on Easel.ly or Photoshop can produce a very basic graphic if someone doesn’t have at least some creative juice flowing.
Sizing and aligning on Easel.ly also works well—with a caveat. Every time the user drags and drops something onto their background, they can click on it once more to show nodes for stretching. And if you move the shape or object with the cursor, guiding lines appear to help the user line the object in relation to other objects on the graphic. But imagine having to drag, drop and align 50 individual stick figures to show something like students in a classroom. Also, when the items are too close to one another, the user inevitably picks up an object they didn’t intend to.
Where Easel.ly shines, is in its method for overlapping objects, i.e. layering. This is quite possibly the most difficult task for a Photoshop newcomer to fathom. Using a positioning tool with arrows going up and down, a user can put several items on top of one another, click on a specific item and decide how close to the top it should be. Easel.ly allows its users to overlap shapes and objects one at time, creating some more work in the long run, but making it manageable and intuitive for someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience.
While there’s not too much on Easel.ly to get overwhelmed over, with simplicity come a few massive roadblocks. The user can only decide between three overall sizes for their graphic: landscape, portrait or mobile. This creates a very basic problem of either having too much than can fit on a graphic or not enough to fill one.
Easel.ly also has the problem of taking “drag and drop” over the top, to where the basic function of simplicity is defeated. Trying to drag and drop a chart is easily the most frustrating component of Easel.ly. Most all info-graphics will require a chart of some sort, so why not create a separate tool just for that within Easel.ly?
I would argue people are familiar enough with inputting data for a simple bar graph or pie chart, and allowing Easel.ly to spit it out. I would even say, given its palatable interface, Easel.ly could create a very easy tool to show a chart actually coming together as a user puts in data.
Overall, Easel.ly is a great tool to use for people inexperienced with graphics. At times they do get a little in over their heads, but they’re well intentioned.