Working with infographics

Note: I am in no way affiliated with Fox News. The article Fun Cheese Facts for National Cheese Day was used to create this infographic, but it was created for educational purposes only.

This week I created an infographic containing fun facts about cheese. I’ve been a bit under the weather health wise, so I was a bit delirious when I was created it. I think it came out OK, but I would have liked to come up with a more scientific system to indicate numbers and quantities. Because I chose the more lighthearted of the two subjects, I think it was OK that my design was a bit informal. Here’s my final infographic:

Six fun facts about cheese.

The first thing I did was create my title and numbers by using a clipping mask to place the cheese background inside the number and letter shapes. I think this worked very well, and I believe this is my strongest element. Next I settled on a parchment-looking texture for my background because sometimes when you buy cheese at the deli it comes wrapped in parchment paper. I decided the parchment texture would go well with the cheese theme.

I’ve been ill lately and running on fumes, so I honestly didn’t look up a lot of infographics for inspiration. I did go back and look at the PowerPoint provided in class to see the examples contained there. I did create a rough sketch of my layout on a piece of paper before designing, but I wouldn’t call it a full-fledged wireframe.

After creating the title and numbers, I chose six of the most interesting facts from the article, and I found corresponding clip art that would depict those facts. I inserted these graphics, and I called it a night. I’m mostly happy with it, but like I said, I could have gotten a little bit more elaborate in my iconography/the way the data is depicted.

For this assignment we were asked to use the pen tool in some way. I have trouble with the pen tool because I don’t have a very steady hand. I haven’t gotten to the level of creating extremely complex shapes with the pen tool, so I decided to use it to create a pretty simple shape. I used the pen tool to create the curved background behind the word “cheese” in the title.