Images are a great way to communicate the message of our social media content. Our images can be broken down into statistical charts, bespoke graphics, and animations or screen recordings (that is, GIFs).

The Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) charts

We can brand and publish charts that have been created by the Publishing team’s chartbuilder tool or by the Data Visualisation team and appear in the article or bulletin on the ONS website.

There were 28.3 million employees on payroll in February 2021, up 68,000 (0.2%) on January.

However, this is 693,000 (2.4%) fewer than in February 2020, before #COVID19 started to affect the jobs market https://t.co/KP02TCJCZJ pic.twitter.com/UlaYozRd4s

— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) March 23, 2021

Of the 10,438 deaths registered in Week 15, 362 mentioned #COVID19 on the death certificate (3.5% of all deaths).

This has fallen by 17 #COVID19 deaths since the previous week https://t.co/M8eFP4LtWL pic.twitter.com/Mn0dXqOrjw

— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) April 27, 2021

When we cannot use the ONS’ charts

• The chart is too big; some charts that appear in the ONS’ publications are not suitable for us to use because of size restrictions on the social media platforms.
• The chart has too many data lines; if there are too many lines of data on a chart, it won’t be accessible for mobile users.
• The chart has been uploaded as a PNG file; PNG images of charts that have been included in the publication (for example, dual axis charts with many data series) aren’t high-resolution enough, so will likely be unreadable on social media, particularly if they have text annotations (Figure 6).

We may not publish images that have not been created by our graphic design team on our social media platforms, even if they appeared on the ONS website.