In this project-centered course*, you will create a content-rich infographic on a topic of your choice using Adobe Illustrator (which you can download for a free, 30-day trial). You might choose to create a visual representation of data from the world of sports, entertainment, politics, or science, to explain a business trend or environmental issue, or even to present a theme or development from your personal life. Your finished infographic will engage your target audience and convey information clearly through effective use of design elements such as typography, color, and structure. Whether you’re a graphic designer, a writer or the intern in the department, you’ll learn: • what an infographic is and what makes a good one • how to work within your limits • how to work with a team (if you have one) • why infographics are effective • techniques for spotting data in stories • six valuable steps for planning an effective infographic • how to use and make some of the building blocks of infographics: maps, charts and flow charts • ways data can be visualized to clarify it and give it meaning • how to effectively design a good infographic by effectively using elements like type, color and an underlying grid structure • some free or cheap, online tools for making various kinds of infographics As you work on your project, you’ll learn more about why infographics are effective, what makes a good infographic, and how to plan and design an infographic for maximum impact. You’ll explore various approaches to data visualization, and you’ll practice creating visualizations like maps, charts, flow charts, and simple drawings in your free version of Adobe Illustrator. Please note that if you are new to learning graphics software, making these graphics could take much longer than estimated as you learn and grow. What you’ll need to get started: This project-based course is aimed at anyone interested in understanding, designing, and using infographics - from students and hobbyists to professional graphic designers. We’ll use Adobe Illustrator for some components of the project. If you don’t have access to the full version of Illustrator,you can download a free version at www.Adobe.com/Illustrator. If the free 30-day trial runs out, you can "purchase" it for a month for about $20. *About Project-Centered Courses: Project centered courses are designed specifically to help you complete a personally meaningful real-world project, with your instructor and a community of like-minded learners providing guidance and suggestions along the way. By actively applying new concepts as you learn, you’ll master the course content more efficiently; you’ll also get a head start on using the skills you gain to make positive changes in your life and career. When you complete the course, you’ll have a finished project that you’ll be proud to use and share. When you enroll in certain courses, you’ll be asked to pay a small fee to share your work with others for peer review.
What are some things you can do to visualize data
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From the course by Michigan State University
Design and Make Infographics (Project-Centered Course)
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From the lesson
Plan and layout an infographic
This week is broken into two key themes: things that you need to know about infographics and this week's two peer-reviewed assignments: 1) plan an infographic and 2) sketch a layout of your infographic.
Meet the Instructors
Karl GudeGraphics Editor in Residence
School of Journalism
[MUSIC]
So what can you do with data?
How can you visualize it?
What are things, actions you can take with the data?
In another video I talked about these visualization symbols or
tools that you can use to work with data.
But using these tools, these elements, what can you do with them?
So let's just look at a few things.
There's more but these are some pretty good ones.
You can show hierarchy information.
You saw this in an earlier video but it's a great way to structure information and
show hierarchy.
Which what's more important, what's less important?
What's bigger, what's smaller?
You can group and categorize things.
The human mind loves to see things organized in categories and groups.
You can break things down into components.
For example, what are infographics?
Here's a Venn diagram?
All a Venn diagram does is it breaks down a big thing into little, little things.
So there's a lot that goes into infographics, really.
But basically, you have content, you have technology, and you have art and
design, and I have a typo.
[LAUGH] Watch those typos, they'll kill you every time.
But you can break down anything, this was done by another student of mine,
Nick Mrowzowski, who went onto great things.
And this was his breakdown of his lunch.
And so a lot of Photoshop was used in here to cut out these things and
Photograph them and then sandwich them so they all look good.
It was actually, there was a bit of work to do this.
You can show pictorial things.
Images of the real world.
This is an infographic I did years ago in Adobe Illustrator that showed different
parts of the house and where technology was going to impact the house.
From the dog and the collar that was going to have Wi-Fi, and
you confined it to your refrigerator that's going to order food, and
your clothes that are going to say, I need to be dry cleaned.
I don't know, all kinds of stuff in every part of the home.
They can show cause and effect.
So for example, this show the cause of why your face deteriorates when you use meth.
If you haven't seen the website, Faces of Meth,
two of these are two of the images from that.
It shows the woman over a three year period.
It also illustrates graphically what is going on inside of your body to cause
these things.
But you can also show cause and effect with the economy.
Too many people just plop a chart in front of everybody's face and
says, here's the unemployment rate.
Why don't you actually use something to tell a story about how the unemployment
rate got to be that way?
People love to have things explained to them.
Really, an infographic should make somebody feel smarter, not stupider.
So help them feel smarter.
That's your job.
You can show a step-by-step narrative, just telling a story like a storyboard.
So this infographic just shows all the different stages of brainstorming
into framing and analysis.
I made this years ago for
the New York Daily News on the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty.
So on one side, left side, I showed a narrative of how she was built,
and on the right side, I did a cutaway showing how she was restored.
So basically, you can combine a lot of these different
things that I'm talking about into one infographic.
You can show time, show things over time, timelines right?
Or you can show line charts, a line chart is over time and in this particular one,
it just shows all the different leaders of the Disney Corporation and hey,
you could show a line chart with little text blocks along the line.
So you're adding not just a line chart but
you're annotating it with timeline information.
Why not go one step further and illustrate that with photos?
So I cut out all their little faces and stuck them on there.
And you'll notice another thing about this graphic as an aside.
That there's sort of a balance there.
Do you see the, just try to focus on the red, just the red text blocks.
I try to have like a triptych there.
Where you have a text block on one end, one toward the top, one toward the bottom.
They're not all cluttered up together.
There's a lot about balance in infographics, so
be aware of that when I'm talking about that.
You can look inside, just as I did with the Statue of Liberty.
Cutaways, people love to see what's inside of things.
You can compare.
You give so much more meaning to a topic when you compare.
For example, if I just say I'm really tall, I'm 6'4''.
If you just say I'm really tall and you just show an image of me just
standing there, you really have no sense of how tall it is.
So I ask my students how would you dramatized how tall I was?
And people say show me next to a short person.
Show me next to a tall person, whatever.
But really you'd want to show me next to an average size American male.
If you really want to be neurotic, you can say with my exact mix of nationalities.
This is an infographic done by a really good friend of mine, Nigel Holmes,
that compares all the different military strengths of the US and
Iraqi forces for Time Magazine.
Really a beautiful piece of work, and
it's one of those things that you just can't tear your eyes away from.
You can also compare with bar charts.
Just putting two numbers together compares data.
You could show what food prices were this year.
How interesting to actually compare that to the year before.
Are we better than we were?
Who knows?
Label things, people love it when you label and explain things.
All too often people will show a photo of a new factory facility and
then they just don't label any of the buildings.
There's a caption that says, our new factory facility.
That's a missed opportunity.
A local reporter here in Lansing, Judy Putnam, did a great story on a mosque and
a church that were side by side and how they shared so many different things.
I went on Google Earth, zoomed in on that, took a picture of that, and
then I just labeled it.
It gives people a much better understanding of what all the different
things there are that they're sharing.
It went really well with her story too.
She loved it.
And look for opportunities to emphasize things.
So for example, in this little graphic, I'm emphasizing by showing,
starting from the top left, you can show by size.
You can show by shape.
You can show by color.
Or you can emphasize by proximity.
So in this case, the Detroit news felt that some text that
they were featuring needed to be highlighted,
some parts of a very long text block of people's texts back and forth.
And so they pulled them out.
They used the size thing and they made them bigger.
They also used color to highlight where those came from in the body of the text.
So look for ways to emphasize things.
So there are many things you can do with infographics, as I've said, and
study this list and see if there's anything.
Try to apply it to your own needs and
see if there's anything here that might be relevant to you, and add your own.
Up here you can't add to the slide, it just won't work.
[MUSIC]
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