IXD104 – Infographic Research – Alanna Lee McKenna's IXD blog

Before I began researching Infographics, I began mind mapping ideas that I could use that were different from the examples we were given in class.

Continuing on from my research into data visualisation at the start of the year, I began looking at Infographics in particular and digitally illustrated graphics. What I was also looking for were the layout of designs that had a lot of different content on one page as this was something on my mind before I began brainstorming.

Sung-Hwan Jang

When researching existing infographics I came across Sung-Hwan Jang who creates infographics using an excellent choice of colours and interesting perspective of the subjects inside his designs. In 2012 he founded the Infographic lab that creates posters and graphics for magazines and his local university. Many of his infographics are based on food or drink and the components involved. My research lead me to finding his infographics on Pinterest and I’d never seen that type of visual information before it had really caught my eye. One of which was an infographic on black tea which informs the viewer on what black tea is, the different steps in making black tea and the different variations from all over the world with Jang stating ‘Everything about black tea is in this infographic.’ What I find really useful on his website is that he shows the steps and processes in creating this infographic and this is something I will revisit for inspiration when it comes to configuring the layout of my infographic.

After researching through a lot of infographics on Pinterest and Dribbble I found that this was style that I liked the most.

At this stage of research I’m thinking of topics I can create infographics on to rise further awareness on things that I am passionate about such as the environment and how things such as Bees and Corals are being effected in our modern world.

I like how simple this infographic is and the flow of the layout how the graphics move your eye as you continue down the page but this has more type than I would like to include. I would like my infographic to consist of more imagery/graphics than words. This is because, I am more of a visual learner and retain information more so than when I have to try and read sentences because of my dyslexia. But I am not alone in this thought as during my research I discovered that we remember 80% of what we see and around 20% of what we read. In 2016, according to Content Marketing Institute’s report, there was a 62% rise in the use of infographics in marketing with sites using infographics receiving 12% more traffic than those who don’t. This becomes even more apparent when I discovered that the average reading speed is about 300 words per minute and visitors of a website decide whether they will stay on a page in the first 20 seconds, which works out at roughly 100 words before they leave. Contrastingly, your eye can recognise 36,000 visual messages an hour, which equates to 200 images in the same 20 seconds you took to decided whether you wanted to stay or press the back button. I know which I would prefer to look at.

From these examples above, I really loved the colour palette used and the visual hierarchy of each infographic. A style I found that I also really liked and want to use in my design is this layered paper effect. I haven’t seen many infographics with this affect used and I feel it is something that makes for a lovely illustrative story telling graphic.

I took the most inspiration from the artists I researched when deciding the topic I was going to create my infographic on, Sung-Hwan Jang inspired me to create my infographic based around food. This was because recipes require a number of different elements and I find it really fun to see these illustrated and layout out on an infographic, almost like little pieces arranged inside a dollhouse. This was something that I couldn’t step away from even when researching the other ideas I had brainstormed.

Minerals and Pigments

One of the other ideas that I almost went with was colours, particularly pigments and the gemstones or minerals that they came from and I went on to conducted some research on this. I felt that this idea would have been strong as I could create an icon set that many of the pigments would share, such as symbols for toxicity, radioactivity, the type of rock or mineral it was such as metamorphic, igneous or sedimentary, each of which could have had its own icon created for and applied to numerous different pigments. The other major positive to creating an infographic on colour would be that I could tie a lot of my information together by colour coding it which I think would make for a very visually interesting piece. Some examples of colourful layouts and elements that I would have liked to utilise.

I feel like these graphic elements are very clean and slick, this kind of feel would be something I would like to implement in the future.

I found very little in terms of infographics based on pigments and where they come from, when in history they were most prevalent, the dangers and how they came about to be created.

Settling On An Idea

As I’ve already discussed, I want to create my infographic based around food or some sort of recipe. This made me think of a documentary I had seen on Netflix many years ago based on a Michelin star sushi Chef known as Jiro Ono titled ‘Jiro Dreams of Sushi.’ He is renowned as the greatest living craftsmen in the world. At an impressive 96 years old, Jiro runs a sushi restaurant in the most unlikely place, a subway station. His 10 seat restaurant ‘Sukiyabashi Jiro’ previously held 3 Michelin stars every year from 2007, which were removed in 2019 as Jiro closed his restaurant to the public, making the restaurant ‘too exclusive.’

“85 year old sushi master Jiro Ono works tirelessly in his world renowned restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro. As his son Yoshikazu faces the pressures of stepping into his father’s shoes and taking over the legendary restaurant, Jiro relentlessly pursues his lifelong quest to create the perfect piece of sushi.”

When I first watched the documentary it blew my mind how much work went into creating each piece of sushi and his particular and innovative techniques and recipes are what made him the best sushi chef in the world. However one thing I did remember was that the actual sushi course he serves only gets around 10 minutes airtime in the 2 hour long documentary. This was the first thing that came to mind when I tired to think of food topics I could create.

So, in summery, my idea is to create an infographic based on how Jiro Ono masterfully prepares and creates his sushi, including ingredients and techniques.

I got back to researching, this time finding infographics or digital illustration based on my chosen topic and I found quite a lot of work based on sushi and found them to be really fun to look at. These helped with my inspiration for the project and I decided the style I wanted to choose were simple, vector based graphics.