The goal of this project was to create a piece about a topic that you’re passionate about. For me I decided from the very beginning that I wanted it to be related to health and fitness as my own weight loss journey is one of the most life changing decisions I’ve made and maintaining a healthier lifestyle is a topic very close to my heart.
The initial idea I had was to run an ad campaign to get people to eat healthier and exercise, but in retrospect it was far too broad, had no direction and has been attempted countless times before with little effect. In order to truly have an effect on my target audience I had to narrow down the scope of my project and focus on a topic that I could use to draw in a specific group of people.
At this stage of the project I needed to put together an idea quickly, so I decided to focus on diabetes as I’m already educated on the subject from my previous job and obtained valuable knowledge about the benefits of a low carb diet. The most diagnosed age group for diabetes is 45-64 so I decided that this will be my target audience and created target audience mood boards to get a sense of my target audiences’ recreational activities, diet and interests. The images I gathered help me to get inside the head of my target audience and I felt like both my male and female target audience would be willing to listen if they’re given the facts from a source that looks trustworthy.
The next step in the ideation process involved researching the various risk factors, symptoms and complications associated with both type 1 and type 2 diabetes; this was so I could figure out how to make my target audience care about how their diet and learn more about the subject matter. From here I decided that focusing on diabetic neuropathy as facing amputation would be a harsh reality for most people and the target audience research lead me to believe their livelihoods would be negatively impacted according to their hobbies and interests.
I started off the design by creating the tabloid spread and placing filler text in an arrangement that was aesthetically pleasing and readable from top to bottom, so that the pages could be distributed in the form of an email newsletter or published online. The text wasn’t the focus of the design, so once I had the filler text in place, I proceeded to figure out how I wanted to display the information that I gathered from my research.
I created the layout in InDesign and used Illustrator to create all the graphic elements myself, with the exception of the world map and map of England. The dendrite of the nerve cells would’ve been hard to produce naturally so I vectorised a tree and used the different branches for a touch of randomness.
Taking the perspectives lecture on colour into consideration, I chose to use the colour red as it is typically associated with danger and I felt that it communicates the importance of message on a subconscious level. I chose yellow as an accent colour instead of green so that the design maintained a warm tone and kept the colours slightly desaturated as it was going to be printed in a newspaper; if I used vibrant colours it would’ve looked out of place against the black-on-grey body copy.
I think the most successful part of the project is how I made sure to only include relevant information and display that information without cluttering the page. I also strayed away from using graphs and in order to avoid making it too scientific, as I thought imagery would resonate more with elder half of my target audience and would be less likely to cause confusion or be misinterpreted.
In hindsight I think the overall design is missing a background element of some kind; I feel like the infographic could’ve benefited from having something behind it as it seems a bit flat and empty in some areas of the page.
