Secondary Social Studies Infographic
One of the recent projects that I had the pleasure of working on was with the education department at UMBC. One of the things this allowed me to do was to go through all of the steps of creating an infographic based on the data, which was largely due to a need to break down complex reports into something a little less complicated.
I got the chance to utilize many of the design trends earlier, when doing things such as teaching courses or compiling portfolio projects for some of my classes. I even got a chance to work with another individual who created infographics as part of his training. However, this was the first time I worked on infographics solo, and as such I had to figure out what was going to happen in regards to not only presenting the information in a legible format, but also figuring out the best way to present these things.
Along the way, I got to apply a number of lessons learned from my previous classes, such as color theory and typography. Coming up with the initial plans required expert use of planning, especially when figuring out what were the key concepts I wanted to present to educators. I started by compiling data and examining what were key differences and points which my target audience would want to hear about.
After that, I spent time creating sketches on how I might want the information arranged. One of the constraints that I realized about the process was that the school’s colors should be clearly represented. However, these strong colors led to an issue when trying to come up with a color scheme which was not too hard on the eyes. I ended up coming up with a mixture of strong and desaturated colors in order to create a pleasing color scheme.
After planning the design out, I then spent time creating the product using both Photoshop and other design tools. You can see the final product below. I believe that going through this process allowed me to get a greater understanding of planning, designing, and presenting data from simple analysis reports to a full-fledged infographic. Pictures of the process are included below.
