My latest infographics assignment might have been the vaguest brief I have ever been delivered. Part of that might have been that this class project wasn't for an actual client. Our professor's fictional client asked only for a series of infographics promoting increased gym membership; the format was up to us and the only thing that had to be included was an attached bar graph. Since I didn't have to sell anyone on my ideas, I decided to get as weird with it as possible. I wanted to have some fun and do some drawings as well. Early on in the creative process I latched onto the idea of "survival of the fittest" and ran with it as far as I could. I was drawing on Darwinian ideaology/imagery as well as the design of old army field manuals and survival guides. I was inspired by books, like the Zombie Survival Guide below, that have been cropping up more and more lately; the kind of thing you see while in line at checkout at Barnes and Noble.
So I went for this strange mish-mash of infographics related to the gym and imagery related to Darwin. It was so out there that I knew it would never appeal to a mass audience, but it was humorous and fun to work on. This was a project for me and whatever niche audience it appealed to.
I wanted the book to look old and weathered so I cast everything on scans of weathered paper. I also scanned in some images of ink I had brayered onto white paper to give things a distressed look. In my aping of these novelty books, I opted to use a minimal color scheme. While in many cases such a limited palette can be detrimental to an infographics legibility, I think I managed to pull it off this time around. It was a fun challenge to incorporate both the distressed look and the one color into successful infographics. I also drew upon the Darwinian imagery to add humor and a unique twist into my layouts. The image of a nerd building muscle was combined with Darwin's textbook depiction of the evolution of man to give a new spin on working out. The headlines referred back to evolution and extinction in order to connect to this central idea of survival. Some viewers might think that the whole thing was a stretch, attempting to draw a line between the gym and Darwin, but to me that was part of the joke.
This was also the first time I had really messed with Illustrator's graphing tools. They were a lot more cumbersome and unintuitive than I could have imagined. I managed to figure out pie and bar graphs, but no matter what I did, I could not figure out the line graphs. I ended up just creating my line graph from scratch. All in all, I think that the programs graphing tools are more trouble than they are worth. I found myself bringing the graphs I made into photoshop to clean them up and make further changes.
My favorite page of the guide was a simple what not to wear graphic. This was one of the first pages I worked on and where it all came together for me. I opted to go with Bodoni for the body text because I wanted a serif font that would have existed during Darwin's lifetime. Besides, the font is a classic and it contrasts well with the sans-serif letterpress style font I assigned to the headlines. Still maybe I only preferred this page because I got to draw the monkey.
Overall, I love the look and feel of the finished product. The only issue is that this kind of thing would never fly in the business world. It functions better as an amusing bit of humorous design than as an actual piece.
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