Hey guys, two weeks ago I drew up some plans to execute in Abode Illustrator and this week they came to life.
Design 1:
This design featured a vibrant background with white vector outlines in front. I soon realised that the white vector outlines and typography were going to be hard to read when clashing with the background. This graphic style also limited the variety of skills and vector types I could use and this wouldn’t be great in terms of my assessment. I also thought the girl’s forehead took up a lot of space and therefore I put the heading there instead of the very top.
Design 2:
This design features a different photo in the background and a different graphic type. Instead of the white outlines, I used colourful vectors and typography. This makes the graphs stand out more in contrast to the background however I wanted an even greater contrast especially as the background is quite diverse in tonal qualities.
Design 3:
In this design, I cropped the original photo to just the eye region and moved the heading to the top centre. The rest of the space is white space, with colourful graphics featured below the photo in the bottom 2/3s. I really liked this design however, I had gathered a lot of statistics and thought the space provided for the graphs wasn’t big enough. However, the graphs against the white background was an improvement in comparison to the photo background.
Final Design:
This design incorporated the white space with the photographic background to create a base for the graphics to be placed and contrasted. The colour palette of warm peach, green, yellow and brown was finalised. It mirrors the colours in the photograph for consistency. The vectors use both outlines and block colouring to form a colourful and fun array of variety and colour. I have also utilised semiotic symbols and icons to visually convey information in a way that can be easily understood by audiences. Such icons include social media platforms and the world map to relate to population. This representation links to the population data as the data is geospatial.
Final Design Revised based on feedback:
To improve hierarchy and layout I broke the information into three rectangular sections, each containing different information, and worked in a column of 3. This made the information easier to read and resulted in more white space as I made some graphics smaller.
Overall, I am happy with my poster and feel it incorporates the design elements of unity, variety, and hierarchy quite nicely via colour, consistent typography, photography, various graphs and vectors. However, looking back I would ensure the dark lines are all the same thickness for consistency and use outlines and block colouring throughout all my graphics. I have used scale and representational graphs to convey the function of the information provided as form follows function. For example, the ‘social media usage %’ uses icons to convey the social media platforms as well as scale to reflect the scale of the usage percentages, along with numbers and an outlined pie chart. Hence, I feel the chosen vectors display an understanding of semiotics as the icons and symbols are used to visually convey the data topic.
By Kayla Mathew
Capture By Kayla 