My Design Process
Knowing I had experience with infographic design (and that it's very time-consuming), I allocated two entire weeks to work through varying fidelities of sketches before settling on my final design. Despite this, my infographic process was by no means a linear process.
While sorting through mountains of data, I discovered that crime statistics are tall and highly asymmetrical. Crime in SF strikes you like a crowbar, and I wanted to convey exactly how harrowing it felt to navigate certain neighbourhoods. My first sketch played with the idea of text following a dotted line that circled around the Golden Gate: a homage to the ironic foundations the city is built upon.
The red doubly served as the color of the landmark, and a representation of violence. Feedback I gave myself at stage was that the text was too small in size, and it wasn't an optimal use of space to screenshot my map with little context.
Draft 2: Reflections on the Bay
Figure 8 & 9. Old SF Infographics
In my next designs (high-fidelity), I continued with the idea of weaving storytelling with SF landmarks. Red doubly served as the color of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a reminder of violence.
Initially, I wanted to represent the bay via sea lions, and an ocean + bridge themed palette. I've worked in Illustrator extensively, and love working with the pen tool. However, despite the time and hours I had put in at this point, I received some harsh feedback from Anthea & Areeba (which was both appreciated & requested) about the general 'vibe' of the piece.
They felt my designs weren't reflective of my insights- most non-locals aren't familiar with the sea lions, and they asked me to focus the scope of my work ("what are the dogs for?)"
Draft 3: Marrying Insights & Design Decisions
This time, I made a statement through color. I replicated the fog around the bridge, and added small finishing touches in Photoshop (ie. highlights and a bloody mist). During this round of critique, Jessica noted that she wished there was more showing, and less telling. Her problem wasn't my aesthetic design- it was how I had represented the insights themselves.
At this point, I had opted for two infographics because of the sheer amount of research & content I had. This lesson was pivotal because I realized that my infographic was to convey the bigger picture through design and symbolism- I didn't have to add a pie chart and little details that the average viewer would skim over.
Figure 10 & 11. New SF Infographics that better convey my message.
Draft 4: The Final one
Figure 10. Non-Color Graded. Figure 11. Color Graded
While less ambitious in scope, this new infographics uses a landscape ratio, better displays my insights, and actually marries my findings with the emotional content of the infographic: violence and chaos.
A great lesson from Jessica was how I should approach the process of design: am I conveying my insights to a first time viewer with no context? What if they were from a different country? Could they understand my work if they could only see the pictures?
To document the idea that there have been more Police Reports than the population over 6 years, I adjusted the height of the bridge to represent the number of people, while adding evictions to the same scale.
I went through several layers and options before settling on my final color grading- the perfect mix of SF-esque colors, grain, and readaibility without losing grit and emotion.
All in all, I was most comfortable with the infographic design process, and least comfortable with MapBox. I initially struggled to create a visualization and clean my data, but the time I spent in Excel helped me hone my insights and decide what I wanted to focus on. Later, I played around with marker styling to create a unique and readable map with several layers of detail and excellent color contrast.
