This assignment requires us to create an infographic that helps fight climate change through raising awareness about the causes and/or the consequences of climate change. We are to base out infographic on a particular article or report. For this assignment, I chose to create an infographic based on this article about the impact of global warming on polar bears:
Polar Bears and Climate Change
Some of the key impacts mentioned in the article are:
- loss of natural ice dens as their natural habitats
- decreased access to food supply due to melting ice caps
- increased time periods spent swimming which led to polar bears drowning in some cases
- a fall in productivity rates
- increased periods of hunger, sometimes driving polar bears to prey on humans
Developing on these, I had an idea of creating an infographic that shows different polar bears at their habitat suffering from the aforementioned symtoms.
Researching
Here are some infographics I really like!
I think that all these infographics have a certain theme in it that’s consistent throughout the design, be it in text, images or the colour scheme. Some even have repeated pattern to give some sort of order to which the eye should read the information.
Creating the infographic
Here’s a sketch of the different placement of polar bears and text that I experimented with before coming up with the infographic. In the end, I chose to use a radii layout for the placement of key information.
First Draft – Critique Session
During the critique session, some areas for improvement were pointed out. My peers pointed out that the font size for most of my text is too large, causing them to look squashed or too near the figures. Also, the font used for the title does not seem eye-catching enough. To be more consistent with the design, I should consider using fonts that are cold, for example, fonts that are shaped like icicles.
The Final Prototype
(Click to enlarge)
In creating the final prototype, I took the comments in and edited my previous infograph accordingly. Font sizes for the text are reduced and the font for the title is changed to one that resembles ice caps to complement the general cool colour scheme of the infograph.
Reflections
Through this assignment, I learned how various ideas and information can be represented in multiple ways, and the more innovative the way of representation, the easier it is to capture attention. As a reader, I’m indefintely bored to tears reading chunks and chunks of readings (with hardly any visuals!). Infographics can be really helpful in summarising key points into a readable visually pleasing format.
Statistics and percentages may not be represented just by using numbers, they may be represented by visuals too! And I’m not talking about graphs or charts, but actual vector art or illustrations. For example, I came across an infographic reporting on the statistics of sinking ships around the world. Bigger sinking ships are used to represent countries where there is a higher percentage of reported incidents and vice versa. At one glance, the reader is able to tell which is the country with the highest percentage of sunken ships without even reading the data. Of course, information in the form of text complements the visuals to give a complete picture about the information conveyed.
