Hey everyone, it's time for another update. I'm closing out November with three posts under my belt, super happy about that! Anyway, time for what you (hopefully) came her for. This post is about yet another school project, the design item du jour was an infographic. It seemed pretty simple at first, find a topic, arrange some statistics, illustrate. I can assure you it was not that easy.

My first struggle was picking a topic, I wanted to start with something fun like "Death through the Ages," but that didn't pan out due to a lack of information that I could source (and also because I didn't feel like looking through that much data). I then tried to look up something I thought would be easy to find, which nations around the globe consume the majority of certain fruits. Again I hit a wall. This time it was in the form of me only being able to find records of imports and exports from particular countries but no data on what they actually were consuming. After staring at the Google search bar for what seemed like an eternity I typed in "sugar content in fruits." Bingo! I finally found something I could work with. A handy little drop-down menu popped up with all of the info I needed.

Since my idea was relatively simple I decided to go with a minimalist approach to the design. I was working with this kind of manila envelope color in my last project (though I didn't end up using it at the time) and decided it would be perfect for what I wanted to do. I did a few sketches at work and got all the details ironed out, here's what they look like.

This was my first sketch, it's how I figured out the layout of the image. There's a little note scrawled at the top that reads "need 1 more fruit." At the time I had only listed eleven fruits in my design but in order for that arrangement to work I needed twelve. That'd make three on the top, four in the middle, and five on the bottom. I wanted to mimic the food pyramid a bit with the shape, so that's why I went with a stepped pyramid design.

This drawing shows what the key or legend was going to look like and also has a thumbnail of the finalized design in the top left.

 This one shows the title of the infographic at the top along with some text that would be displayed under that. I also drew the fruits in a little more detail, the black silhouette is the shape of the fruit and the white unfilled space represents the percent of sugar in the fruit.

I started my image by making a background in the manila color I selected, then created a two inch white border around each side. I got all of the bits and pieces arranged where I wanted them, then it was just a matter of creating the fruit shapes and listing all of the information I gathered. The description of the process was greatly simplified as I really don't feel like going through the horror of that again. For some reason filling in the shapes I created with that little touch of white at the bottom was exceedingly difficult, I'll be asking my professor if there was another way I could have gone about it. In the end I came up with something I was pretty happy with. The design's pleasant, well balanced, and the color pallet is simple and doesn't distract from the information being conveyed. Here's the final product so you can see for yourself.

That's all for this post! I've got one more project I need to finish so look forward to seeing that one sometime in early December. Hopefully I've got some time for some personal stuff on winter break, I'll make sure to update as frequently as I possibly can. Thanks for stopping by!