As my infographic is based on the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, most of my preparation consisted of watching the documentary a few times. The second and third time I watched it I took notes on information I felt was important and wanted to highlight.

Designing the Background

Choosing a Typeface

I began looking for the right font for my titles and headings on adobe fonts.

Phosphate / Inline / 50pt

Macho / SemiBold Italic / 50pt

Salamat / Regular / 58pt

Secondary Font

Eras Light ITC / Regular / 26pt

Using type-scale.com to help me with choosing the the right sizing when varying the pieces of information in my infographic with hierarchy.

Sushi Course Documentary

Icon and illustration Sketches

Drawing Ideas Digitally

I began drawing each piece of sushi on a programme called procreate, which allows me to create illustrations with a hand drawn feel but this is where I ran into my first problem. I loaded my first few pieces of sushi onto my artboard on adobe illustrator and found that my drawings became pixilated when I tried to resize them. I tried to resolve this with changing them to a vector but there isn’t an option for that.

So after a few frustrating hours of trying to find a solution I decided to create the sushi within adobe in a vector based illustration as the ability of resizing the sushi was vital at this stage of design as I was still unsure of the exact layout I wanted.

Creating the rice within procreate was pretty straight forward as I just used many overlapping circles of different opacities and shades of grey, but on illustrator this would have been a very long process. I tried making the grains of rice individually but the effect would have been lost on the white background of the infographic.

Instead I created 3 graphic elements in a shade of white then duplicated these and coloured them a slightly grey colour to act as shading. This design was simple but effective and I am happy with the overall finish of my sushi pieces.

Egg Making Process

The part of the documentary I enjoyed the most was the showcase of the 20 course dinner that is served. One dish that get some spotlight for its preparation was the Tamagoyaki (egg sushi) which takes 10 years to perfect and is the last test you must take before Jiro lets you become a sushi chef in his restaurant. I thought that this process was simple enough and would be fun to illustrate as the colour pallet in most of the frames are the same and this would work well on the last section of my infographic. The shades f brown and yellow will also company the background I have created well, tying all the elements together.

Sketching Illustrations

Master Apprentice

The master apprentice tasks set earlier this year was something that become very useful for me in this infographic. For a few of the icons I used images for reference and replicated them and I found this help me a lot in terms of speeding up my design process as well as making something that looked better as it more closely resembled the real thing with these simple designs.

Mirin

ginger, wasabi and soy sauce

I used an image of a ladle to help get the right perspective

Just as I had used for the background of the infographic, I took an image of the shopfront and tried to replicate it in its most simplest form using only rectangles.

 

I found simple line illustrations of a clam and mackerel to use as reference and coloured them with colours previously used in the illustration above of Jiros shopfront.

Another obstacle I ran into was trying to replicate the semi cooked tamagoyaki and the bumps or wavy pattern than the sticks make as they were placed underneath. In the end, I left these waves out of the design as they weren’t present when all 4 rods were under the egg roll in the documentary.

I used guidelines to help me keep my content in order and to ensure the spacing was equal between elements. I the first half of the infographic is laid out well and is visually pleasing however, I had some trouble with which way to layout the step by step process of making egg roll without it feeling like there was too much empty space.

I think that part of the placement issue was that these elements aren’t all equally sized so my solution to this was the same as in my last project. I added a circle graphic behind these illustrations to help tie them together and line them up better. In the end, I’m really happy how it turned out although I wish the last section had ended as good as I had hoped.

This is the high resolution pdf of the final infographic:  JIRO ONO INFOGRAPHIC