Category: Second Brief

Today we had a workshop on Illustrator creating an infographic about Lincoln. This was a helpful exercise for creating ideas more than anything, especially with the sheep infographic.

I also found it helpful learning how to duplicate things using the alt and shift keys instead of copying and pasting them.

I also properly scaled my Roman heads which is something I did not know how to do.

Now that I have completed the tutorial today, I feel I have a better understanding of how Illustrator works and it was a nice little refresher for me whilst I am making my Einstein infographic.

Here is a plan of my grid and where all of the information will go on my infographic. I have tried to use a clear grid system of 3×4 squares. As the infographic is quite text heavy, I will make all of the key points and words different shades of a colour and include some little vector images and a picture of Einstein to make the infographic more visually appealing.

My planned audience is for school children studying physics between the ages of 10 and 16.

Here is a picture of my sketched out plan:

Today in our workshop we looked at the importance of grids and created our own professional magazine layouts using a grid.

Using a grid with any form of design, from shelves to buildings to film posters, makes the design look cleaner, smarter and generally more professional. I will ensure that I use a grid when creating my infographics – I will probably use 3 columns and possibly 6 rows to place my information on.

Here are some screenshots of my magazine that I created in class today:

Tufte was a statistician and a pioneer in the field of data visualization. He is particularly an expert with information graphics like charts and diagrams. He is also known for criticising Powerpoint, saying it has poor typography and simplistic tables and charts. Tufte has written several books including ‘The Visual Display of Quantitive information’, ‘Envisioning Information’ and others.

Here are some of his infographics that I particularly like:

I really like the simple use of just red and blue in different shades to represent the statistics for Scarborough. This proves that you do not need to use loads of colours in order for your infographic to be successful.

This is my favourite of his infographics. The typeface really suits the theme, I like the choice of background and brown colour theme. The darker lines that connect the diagrams also make the poster easy to follow. In addition, the vector graphics work well on the poster with showing which coffee is which.

This reminds me of Josef Muller-Brockmann and Bauhaus designs. The jagged shapes and circular design all works very well together as it looks like a disc broken up. I also like the old paper look background – it just makes the page look a bit more interesting.