AFR 303 Work Process

As I continue working on AFR 303, I want to document the typical work process I go through in order to create a graphic or graphic de-design. In this case, I was creating a graphic based off of a slide.

This is the initial slide. It was particularly difficult because there are 3 sets of data that do not correlate in terms of metrics. Unlike the slide about gender and college, I wasn’t able to simply convert the populations into a percentage and combine the graphics. We’re dealing with three distinct units of measurement:

Proportion of men in the static year of 2000 in jail vs. college
The proportion of men as a dynamic between 1980 to 2000 in prison system vs. college
The percentage of men who are ex-offenders 16-34 years old (young men are much more likely to go to jail.)

Attempt 1
My first attempt at tackling all of this different info was to try and dump it on one slide with three separate unrelated graphs. I could sense going in that this would likely not work, but I was also hopeful that it could work if I tweaked it enough.

While it didn’t come out awful, it is a large load of information and there isn’t enough of a story going on in between each graph. You really want your graphs to tell a dynamic story as you follow along, especially when you have a collection of graphs like this.

Attempt 2

Maddy assisted me in re-thinking these graphs and creating more of a cohesive story with them. Considering how the first two both tell similar information, and the range goes 1980-2000, we were able to come up with a story that tells “between 1980 and 2000” and then “by 2000.” The last one still wasn’t super related, but it works as a side-note at the end.

The problem here was the text. The text itself was quite small on this version, and would be hard to read for a professor looking at the powerpoint some distance away. To combat this, we decided to keep all three graphics on separate slides:

These are simple, but each graph can be seen clearly and is large enough to read. Additionally, the separation of each slide makes the last statistic less like a non-sequitur.

What I Learned:

Try to avoid shoving tons of different graphics into one slide
Try to combine graphics into one narrative or metric if possible
Always try and tell a story with the graphics
Don’t be afraid to use multiple slides if it will ultimately work better

Other Graphics Made Recently

Here are some other graphics I created recently for AFR:

Stay tuned for more processes!