In the role of Content Creator me and my group were given the task of creating an infographic on Adobe Illustrator, a tool I first used this semester in my Media Skills Two class. The challenge with this project was that we were given only three weeks to make our finished project. Knowing this, we quickly decided that our infographic should be music based, originally on the history of physical music to digital, our lecturer informed us however that this could be too broad a topic to sufficiently cover in this format. After a short rethink we decided on just streaming music and how it has developed.
Our researcher was extremely punctual and found relevant sources within the first three days of our project. My previous experience as Production and Dissemination allowed me to work with and understand the role of Content Creator so I knew the importance of me making a draft of the final product was pivotal for the project to progress. I independently researched infographics and found some examples of colour schemes and visual imagery that I liked and brought to the group meeting. This was then shown by me to the group and we decided on what we liked, didn’t like and I got to draw a rough concept piece of the graphic. Unlike in my previous groups, we had a member who commuted, which meant the group chat and group meetings were more important than before as we had to make sure we covered everything as the possibility of a spontaneous meet up wasn’t available.
I took the initial sketch and transferred it to a word document, this was to show the essential shapes and typography to our Production and Dissemination member more clearly. I knew I would be working closely with the P+D role so it was convenient that I held this position in the last project and when it came to actually making the final product we were able to help each other in re-creating the original vision of our project. Our Project Manager fell ill, this meant he couldn’t make the final meetings, thankfully however, we sent pictures of our progress and received immediate feedback on what he liked and didn’t like. For example, our original design was a combination of pink hues, after sending it to our PM he informed us to change it to blue instead, a change we all approved of.
Overall, I am somewhat happy with our final product. Our collective limited knowledge of Illustrator let us down and I feel like the final product doesn’t accurately represent an infographic, but rather a poster. Some elements of the original also had to be removed, for instance we originally anticipated implementing a graph along the body of the silhouette, however this made the graphic too busy and difficult to follow, the opposite of an effective infographic. This was a running theme throughout, our lack of knowledge of Illustrator meant we overestimated just how much information could be put on screen and so we had to opt for the sub headings of ‘Five Facts’ and ‘A history’ to make the graphic easier to follow. Personally, my main gain from this project was learning that the switch from paper to online graphic isn’t as easy as it seems, and that we perhaps should of incorporated Illustrator more in my Content Creator stage to build the foundations of the final piece.
Media and communications 