Infographic – Final Submission – Spiders in the UK || 104

For our second project in IxD 104, we were told to make an infographic. I wanted to make it on something I’m passionate about one way or another, so at first, I couldn’t decide between ticks or spiders, both are interesting topics that there is a lot of information about. Ticks would be about how dangerous they are and how to present diseases that they spread, and spiders would be tamer and be about how they’re not inherently dangerous, how to identify them and where they can be found around the UK.

Before I began with the sketching I gathered the information that would be necessary for the infographic.

I wrote down a limited amount of information at first to get a general idea of what I had to work with, and then I moved on to sketching up ideas of how I wanted my infographic to be made.

This was my first sketch for the project trying to get all my ideas out on paper, but I felt like it was futile because I was unsure of how large my graphics would be and how to properly size it.

Here is my second sketch of the ideas I had but I implemented the information I had gathered until that point to once again try to properly size it and get a better idea of how to line it up to make everything feel relevant.

This was my third sketch trying to line up the information and make it look better and I also chose to minimize the squares, even tho they will be there to give me more space to work with since this infographic will be quite long. I wasn’t too happy with the lack of information I had, but I figured that the other information if to be added could be implemented into the design one way or another.

So after I had finished my sketching of the outlay I began to sketch the spider faces I wanted to have in my infographic for identification purposes. I chose to leave on spider because of the similarity of the species, hence changing 10 to 9.

With the help of the website http://www.spiders.jeremypoolesem.org.uk/index.htm#species I could give the spiders an anatomically correct face. I began drawing from google images hence a few inaccurate drawings, but they were later on fixed when I made them digitally.

After I was done sketching I began to illustrate my images digitally in illustrator one by one, making them more anatomically correct with the help of the website I found earlier.

Whenever I was done making the faces I moved on to illustrating the bodies. Sadly I had to trace the bodies of the spiders from images I found around the web to make them as accurate as possible. The reason why is because I wanted to accurately represent the spiders looks to give my infographic potential to actually be used to teach people how to properly identify either harmless or more harmful spiders around the UK.

After I was done with the Illustrations I began to make other graphical elements, such as the other illustrations to the document I made myself, e.g. the net and the spider hanging from it.

Here is what the spider and the Web looked after I first illustrated the Idea.

I chose to use Baskerville as the header typeface because it’s older and I felt like it suited my infographic well.

Here is the first version of the infographic I showcased to the class.

I got positive feedback from the class, but not really critique which was disappointing, I remember that my spacing could be worked on even further.

Here is the second update I had, at this point I had moved around the images slightly to make more sense of it because I wasn’t too happy with how I sized it and the spacing wasn’t great either.

After some more tweaking, I also added some more details and information.

Displayed underneath was my third update, I added more spacing and a little bit more information. I also changed the layout for the spiders and added more colour to it to make it look better. I also added information about the False widow species, since they’re considered semi-harmful to humans and decided to highlight the spiders that are, and have harmed humans in the past with red text. I also added a map with where you can find certain spider species and/or where they usually are, as well as a section of what good spiders do for us.

However, the background colour and the red didn’t feel readable, and after some feedback from friends, I changed the colours. I changed the very bright dark red to a more dull red and changed the background from dark grey to a dull dark blue.

Displayed underneath is almost the final product, I had a little bit more work done, adding more visuals and more information about spiders, and how they do well for our environment, and us as well in medicine.

Final Product

Here is the Final Product of my infographic.

I wanted to make an infographic educating the regular UK citizen about spiders, where they could be found and how to identify the more common species that can be found, as well as the positive impact spiders have on us and on our environment. I took information that I gathered around the internet, fact-checked it and summarised it into this document and added visuals to it to make an interesting infographic, in hopes that it will teach the public that spiders are not as scary as we believe they are. The typefaces I chose to use in this project are Baskerville 10 pro as the Header font and Gill Sans Nova as the font for the body, which I found matched each other very well, giving it a nice balance between the two typefaces. I chose to work with three main colours, dark blue, A dull red and white. I found that using three colours was a nice balance and didn’t make the document too busy. I did however add more colours to the map, but it was only to showcase each individual spider and where they could be found around the UK.

I also chose to add more information about what to do if bitten, just as a caution and to educate the viewers of the document on what to do.

I’m Overall very happy with this project and how I used the information I gathered to make an infographic to my own design standards. I found the research part the most fun because it was interesting to learn more about spiders and how they’re doing more good than bad to us as humans, as well as how their venom is used in medicine in varying ways.

It was a fun project to do, thank you.