INFOGRAPHS

Project: Nutrition Education Infographics

Client: Marissa Duswalt Epstein – Lecturer and the Director of The University of Texas Nutrition Institute

Completion status: In progress

Description / plans: Create info graphs to be used in her nutrition handbook. The first assignment is to create an info graph based off of a design brief before starting on graphs for the handbook to establish a sense of style for the overall look in accordance with the styling of the handbook.

These are the rough sketches for the layout of the design brief. It is a comparison chart of calorie density to water content based on a certain volume of a type of food. I drew these out a Thuy then made edits on AI while I helped her make decisions on the type of edits to make within the file.

Here is the first graph that Thuy put together based off of my third sketch above. We are waiting for the client to provide feedback on what she thinks of the design. It is very simplistic to not distract from the information trying to be conveyed through the graph and the text that would be on the handbook. We based the look off of the design guidelines and the appearance of the handbook. Thuy added these icons to make the graph appear more visually appealing and less plain.

Hebrew Flash Conversion Update

I’ve now got access to a list of extracted flash interactives for the Hebrew site. This removes and human error that would come from manually scraping the page. It turns out there are around 100 flash interactives. However, most of these are multi-paged, and that isn’t something that Canvasser can natively handle (pages must be stacked manually by the user). It’s with this in mind and the complexness/repetitiveness of certain interactives that I’ve decided to take a deep look at all interactives and decide how they should be created.

I’m keeping a few things in mind:

• Which creation tool the interactive’s format most closely matches (The two other creation methods are Quia flashcards and Quia multiple choice)
  • If it is to be created in Quia, is there a loss of cohesion, style, or formatting?
• Difficulty to create in Canvasser
• Potential to split an interactive between parts

It ends up being that many modules could be created in Quia (thanks to talks with Kevin), and it stands to be said whether using these tools instead will hinder the original goal of the interactive. This is why Canvasser is the best option disregarding creation, because it can replicate the interactive almost completely. However, they can become fairly difficult to create as each page complicates and the number of pages increases.

Institute for Historical Studies Suffrage Poster

I was tasked with creating a poster for the Institute for Historical Studies, who are hosting a talk to commemorate 100 years since the 19th amendment.

There were a few challenges:

1. Lots of text of different types was to be included.
2. The tone of the talks were not positive.
   1. However, I want to portray the talks as critical of the past, but not intensely anti-American.
   2. A critical tone is hard to portray within a poster, especially given an image of the side the talks support (not the opposition one is being critical about).

My first draft, in an effort to make the different varieties of text easy to distinguish and read, used gradient blocks. However, this ended up actually being confusing to read, and it wasn’t very visually appealing.

The hours I spent with the text, though, rearranging it in different ways, eventually enlightened me to the point where I could see a simple way to organize the text which was still unique. In the end, I was able to insert many elements of design that I enjoy using in my own work: blocky highlighting, faint patterns in the background, and distorted text. The distorted text in particular was actually suffrage posters’ text extracted from photos. The distortion offers a darker, historical tone, which luckily came from the poster creators themselves rather than my own editing (which is a false visual narrative). I really like the end result. Special thanks to Jaclyn for helping touch up elements of the design, such as creating larger negative space to frame the text, and decreasing the size of the colored pattern to remove unwanted attention.