The quarter-long project for my Visual Information Design course was to create an infographic with the topic of our choice that displayed five forms of visual potential: locations, numbers, relationships, appearances, and time. I chose to design my infographic around the popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S because it has been my favorite TV show ever since high school and been a part of my daily life the past few years as I would watch it to start my mornings off on a cheerful note. This infographic was created through Adobe Illustrator.
To get a better understanding of what visual language, typography, and colors are used in the visual language/typography and color models, I filled out a guidebook documenting the specific styles and practiced recreating those elements used in the models to be later used in my infographic.
Creating Visual Potential
Each week for four weeks, I created two displays each illustrating locations, numbers, relationships, and appearances while modeling the display after my visual language/typography and color models above. I would receive three critiques for each display and would choose which of the two I wanted to make revisions to.
For each of the displays, I would explain how I exploited visual potential, followed design principles, and emulated my visual language/typography and color models. The following screens demonstrate how I documented these elements for my appearance display. Critiques that I received for the appearance displays included incorporating more interior details for the characters' icons to follow the model’s icons and to shorten the description below as there are not large paragraphs of text in the model.
From my infographic, I want viewers to take-away the impact of the show as seen through the location display (representing the international impact it continues to have) and the number display (representing the large number of viewers who tuned in). For viewers who haven’t seen the show, I hope they learn that there’s something unique about each character through the characters' icon appearance display as I feel like because each character is so unique, it allows the audience to find someone they relate to on the show. The third take-away is for viewers to learn about facts that they wouldn’t have known from just watching the show such as the statistics about the Emmy awards and that even though the show had scenes from different locations, a lot of them in fact were shot locally.