Images for social media

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.

Sources for charts and graphics

All statistics in social media graphics should contain a publication source. We always use the source of the publication being promoted rather than the data source or survey name. This is so that users can easily search for and find the data if the chart is used by external websites.

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.