09/Assignment 3 Information Design
For this assignment, we had to create an infographic based on a set of data. I had chosen to do an infographic of capybaras as they are one of my favourite animals. Before starting to design my infographic, I went online to look at what other animal infographics looked like to get some inspiration. I wanted to know what information was introduced by an infographic beyond basic facts such as an animal’s height and weight. A particular infographic that inspired me was one on polar bears where at the end they had shown polar bears in pop culture. I found this very cute and thus wanted to apply it in my own infographic as well (link).
I knew that I wanted to have a big capybara in the centre of the infographic with certain features highlighted and elaborated on. For the main capybara I had two birds sitting on it as other animals like to hang around or ride on capybaras, making them known as nature’s ottoman. I wanted to put some basic information at the side of this main capybara to show their scientific name, height, weight and diet. To show this list, I was inspired by a pokedex and how it lists out information. I had also added other information on their diet, reproductive cycle and their native land with drawings above it to make it more interesting. Lastly, I had a section on how capybaras had become one of Japan’s internet superstars.
After having a rough guideline on what I wanted to show in the infographic, I went to find images which I could either use or trace and edit. In the end, most of the photos were traced using the pen tool since I could edit them as I wish. For example, to create the icon for location, I had traced an image but had edited it to have more trees. I used the tree I had traced and just scaled, reflected or changed the colour of the leaves to create an image of a densely packed forest with a stream running through it. Also, by tracing the image I was able to have a more consistent art style since I could decide on the amount of details shown.
Next, I had positioned all the elements into something similar to what I had sketched into a mockup page. From there I added all the text and descriptions that I wanted to convey and tried to organise them. I also added a description of capybaras that was essentially a summary of my infographic to make it more similar to a pokedex, where there would be a description beneath the table of data. This was a very rough draft of what I wanted to show, and I left it as a black and white work as I just wanted to play with the positioning of all these images. I had shifted the main capybara to the left of the infographic rather than leaving it in the centre as there would be less blank space created. Also, it leaves me more space for the text in later sections.
Lastly, to create the actual infographic for critique, I created another artboard and finally added colour. Since capybaras are cute and brown, I wanted to go with soft, light pastel colours that go well with brown and thus chose yellow as a background. I did not want any of the images to be too glaring, so I used lighter colours and a light grey to circle these images. To colour the images, I used the dropper tool to pick out colours from the original image and if the colour was too bright, I would go to ‘tints’ and choose a similar colour that would better fit the poster.
Throughout this entire process I found that I was important that I was organised in my layers and groups since there are a lot of elements in this infographic. If I were not organised, I would always select too many objects which I do not want to select and it becomes very difficult to lock objects when they are in different layers and each part is in a different group. This is especially so when I want to scale and move object since I would often move most of the image but lose some of the parts.
In the critique, there were two main problems which were highlighted. Firstly, there was a space at the top right corner next to the title and secondly, the font in the text was not very suitable as it is too faint. To resolve the first issue, I had shifted the main capybara to the right and moved it up slightly so that the blank space is used. I moved and scaled down the data table that is beside the main capybara so that I could accommodate the space the circles and description text used. One issue I had faced was the margins around the infographic, if the capybara was too high, there is very little space for some of the text, but too low and the blank space would still be there. Thus, I had to go through quite a few adjustments and scaling before I managed the final work.
The second issue was much harder to resolve as I had a lot of problems with font, even when I was doing up the infographic for the critique. Initially I used Gill Sans for the title and Courier New for the descriptions to have a serif and a sans-serif font. However, Courier New was too faint as the strokes are very thin, combined with the fact that I had used a rather small font size, the descriptions in the infographic are not easily read. After playing around with many fonts and researching on which font goes with Gill Sans, I ended up with Minion Variable Concept as it is still a serif font, but its strokes are slightly thicker, improving the readability of the infographic.
