Assignment 3 - Infographic

Wolf or Woof?

I decided to do wolves vs dogs because I wanted a light-hearted topic that is easy to research. Other topics I briefly looked into were the euthanasia roller coaster, ice cream sandwiches in Singapore and the extinction of grey wolves. After gathering the data in a table on Words, I got to drafting the layout.

Drafts

First 4 drafts

Final Draft

Drafting is very important in helping me determine the layout and what vectors I need to draw. My first 4 drafts had the wolf vs dog physical traits in a very complicated manner with an over-emphasis on eyes when the data represents other features like the nose and teeth. As I have quite a lot of points for comparison, drafting allowed me to prioritise points to include by seeing if it is easy to draw the icons. Gradually, the drafts resulted in fewer words with a clear prominent focus (i.e the half dog half wolf face) on the topic at hand. I feel that the drafting stage should be taken seriously as it informs the design and encourages easy exploration as I can just represent things with symbols. 

Illustrator

After drafting up the sketches, I started working on creating the vectors I would need for the infographic. 

1. Barking dog and wolf
2. Food (dog bowl vs steak + bones)
3. The frontal face of dog and wolf
4. Wolf hunting in grass vs Dog playing/domesticated

I first went to google some photos and then used AI to trace it out by lowering the opacity and using the Pen Tool. I abstracted the outline and removed the strokes to get the effect I wanted. I repeated this for all the vectors, referring to other pictures and vectors on the other monitor.

Final abstraction vs Wolf outline

To add shading to the wolf, I duplicated the base body and removed the bottom paths as seen in step 2. I then used the Pen Tool, connect to the open anchor points and start to draw the fur in. I did not use a brush to mimic the fur as I wanted to keep the design simple.

Shading - Step 1

Shading - Step 2

Shading - Final outcome

 

I first used the Ellipse Tool to draw the eyes. I then used Pathfinder to make the iris of the eyes (minus front) which helped in easily manipulating the eye since it is now one path. Similarly for the bone, I used Pathfinder (unite) to make the 5 circles into one path.

Howling Wolf's eye

After making the wolf vector, I had a rough understanding of how to do my other vectors. I did a rough outline from the pictures and ensured that each body part that I needed in different colours were connected to a separate pathway. Unlike in the wolf one where I had to disconnect and connect back a lot of paths during the abstraction. I also did not go so deep into details when tracing because it is an abstracted form anyways. 

Carcass

To make the carcass. I drew the first bone and then arranged it in a descending order on the top side. After which, I selected all the rib bones on top and reflected it horizontally. I then decreased it in size and aligned it with the top bones. This was easily the most satisfying of all the vectors I drew.

For the wolf-dog split face, I first had to find the images and then crop them accordingly to see if the aligned image will match well in terms of the proportion of the face. The wolves are the hardest to do because a lot of additional layers of colours needs to be added to mimic the fur and also give shape to the wolf's face. All these were done with the Pen Tool and filling. In creating the vectors, it was extremely important to keep track of the layers given that the wolves have so many different features going on. 

Wolf dog split face

Layers for wolf dog split

All the Vectors

Indesign

This is the final layout after copying over the icons and filling in the words. It was very useful to use the ctrl+alt+c to trim the textbox to fit the text. Additionally, I the column grids were readjusted to give more space to the first and last column for text display. The rulers were also used to help align headings and texts across the infographic. As it can get a little messy with all the lines, it was useful to use the W shortcut key to turn off the grid and rulers to get a better look at the layout.

Bullet points for Paragraph Style

I also used Paragraph styles for the text and Character styles for the headings. This allowed me to try different typefaces, font-weight and size to see what is better. The paragraph styles allowed me to apply bullets. Though there was a need to adjust the left and first-line indent to manipulate the spacing between the bullet point and the text. 

Pre-Critique Infographic

Pre-Critque Infographic

As I wanted to keep a simple clean look, I kept to two typefaces and limited the number of words on the infographic. This was to avoid a situation in which having too many typefaces or words would make the infographic clustered, distracting and unappealing. 

I wanted the focal point of the infographic to be on the split face vector because it shows the main essence of the infographic without having to use words. However, the two blocks of information on top (i.e the food and their sounds) took up more space than anticipated. I was thinking of other ways to go about representing the information on top so that the split face icon could be in the middle but I eventually compromised by pushing the split face a bit further down. This was because I wanted to keep sufficient breathing space between the words and icons without losing the visibility of the details of the vectors.

I tried to maintain balance by alternating the positions of both the icons and the words so that neither side appears too heavy with content. There are even amount of vectors on either side of the infographic. The generous breathing space allows me to get away with certain texts being longer while still maintaining balance.

Overall, I chose a grey background as I feel that the colour is neutral. It allows for my audience to immediately be attracted to the different colours (or shades) of the vectors which is my intention because I feel that infographics should show rather than tell.

Critique Session

Classmates suggested standardising the dog colours and giving the split face vector more contrast as both the dog and wolf use shades of grey.

I tried a brown look for the dog but I feel that while the contrast was brought out, I did not like the overall look and found that the brown shades overshadowed the wolf colours. Furthermore, I feel that the grey dog is more impactful in focusing on the structural differences between the wolf and dog (eyes, nose, ears etc.). The audience is less likely to be distracted by the colours if they both have similar coats. Additionally, the different coloured dogs are intentional in showing that dogs have many coatings while wolves do not (hence the wolves all have grey colours). This critic showed me that this intention was not properly brought forward. Hence, I included a section of text for the coating to properly establish textual meaning.

Brown Dog vs Black Dog

For the title "Wolf or Woof", Kai suggested using typography to show a distinction between wolf (more violent) and dog (more gentle). I attempted this as I wanted to challenge my usual design of standardised typography by playing around with different typefaces and layouts. This was done as the last step after I changed the layout of my infographic as I did fear that adding new typefaces would become too distracting given that there is going to be more words on the infographic. Contrary to my worries, I think it turned out great as the different typefaces were used on the title, a section that allows for greater typography creativity. Classmates also suggested increasing the font size which I have to agree with because it is the main heading of the infographic and needs to stand out when the infographic is first looked at.

Lastly, classmates gave the critic to tighten the layout and shift the focal split face vector to the middle of the infographic. Kai also suggested showing contrast by having a darker background colour for the wolfs' side. They suggested leveraging on the split design by having all the wolf facts on the left and dogs' on the right. I was very open to this suggestion as the layout immediately shows the audience it is a comparison between wolves and dogs. I explored putting the section headers in the middle but I felt it was too distracting to have some headers in the middle and others at the side (I did not want to put any headers across the split face vector). Hence, I aligned all the text to the margin with the align-right/left feature which was helpful (I don't have to struggle to align it myself). I decreased my margins to give more breathing space between the split face vector and the words and also allow for lengthier information at the top and bottom. To ensure that the information is equally segregated, I made use of the create guide feature that lets me split the page into rows. I did 4 rows so that the middle two rows hold the focal point (split face vector) while the first and last row houses information that requires more space.

Create Guides Feature

Following the split format, the vectors on either side needed to be balanced in terms of details. Comparing the initial food vectors, the wolf one allowed for a very nice fit with the text while the dog bowl left too many empty spaces. Hence, I ended up adding 2 more vectors for the dog food while splitting up the wolf food into 3 other vectors. This allowed for equal distribution and balances the content and white space on both sides.

Final Infographic