The first thing I found strange about this process was that, more than any other requirement yet for this class, I felt the form was given more priority than the content. I don't know why this paralyzing conundrum didn't come up in the A/V project; maybe deep down video is is more a more familiar form of expression to me than an infographic. The latter is certainly entirely new territory.
Needless to say, late Thursday evening when I found myself finally free from the hospital and the ensuing whirlwind of necessary atmosphere re-entering, I found myself with a form in need of content, and a disturbing lack of (or perhaps more accurately too many half-formed) brainstorms on what to fill it with. Late yesterday afternoon, I was still in the same boat.
When I sit down to write, I'm not sitting down to write because I want to "make writing". The form, in other words, is not primary reason I am sitting down. I do that because I already have an idea which I am confident, through previous experience, that writing will allow me to convey. It will do this largely by getting out of my way, or appearing to, anyway, because of how familiar the form has become to me. In well-versed and well-practiced forms like this, the form and the content can play well together because I am used to them playing well together. I know the pitfalls of one, and the strengths of the other.
But infographics are new territory, like I said. When I finally settled on a topic, I knew a lot of the different things that I wanted to say, but being unfamiliar with the form (and limited by the technology; we'll get to that in a minute) I found myself falling back to ungainly middle strategies I've used in the past for posters, advertisements, quote pages, and the like. Looking back, I used a lot of typographical and color flair like I would with any of these mediums, and a whole-lot-of-not-flair in the one category infographics perhaps really shine: space.
To be fair, I was limited somewhat by this with the technology I chose. Being familiar with powerpoint and wanting to wade out into the sea of fledgling internet-apps, I chose Canva and, after about two hours when I was running into some serious limitations of template size, graphic and graph limitations, and the slow, slow, slow pace it made my Firefox run (It's not yet usable on Safari), I was wanting to flee back to the boxy familiarity of powerpoint with no shame. I admit I opened powerpoint up and played around for a half hour or so trying to imitate my design, but Canva did have one thing going for it: it looks slick, and that was something the poster-expert side of my brain was not wanting to give up.
I realized by the end that by exporting multiple canvases out of Canva you could potentially splice them together to make a single canvas, and at the speed the web app was running by the end I can see why they limit your size to what it is. But the whole prospect of conjuring some splicing wizardry plus making a whole 'nother canvas by that time was feeling like a bad dream, so I took the single canvas I had and called it good.
So, speaking of good, let's start with the bad.
Infographics are so called, at least in part, because of their lovely ability to have graphical pictures. Yet my entire project contains a grand total of one bottle (Although a sexily translucent bottle, if we're being honest here). Though Canva has an impressive array of icons, and though admittedly an impressive number of them are free, they're arranged in a way that is exceedingly difficult to navigate, and with my already limited space, none of them seemed specific enough or graphically useful enough to pull their own weight with the tight space I was working with. They were very general, and for the life of me I could find none that really lined up with what I was doing (Even the bottle, if you notice, looks more like glass than plastic, so even that was a stretch). Thus, limited by Canva's graphical selection, I relied a lot more on its sexy typography, and, limited by its set size, I relied a lot more on significantly less-sexy chunks of text rather than really spreading out and using the graphic to push and pull reader's eyes in unusual and enticing directions. My infographic reads, surprise surprise, a lot like a paragraph or a bulleted list or a slick informational poster — right back into territory I'm familiar with.
The good of course is that I do believe that it looks pretty. I think towards the end I was getting better at compressing complex information into the bare, slim essentials, which was a good lesson in itself. All told, however, I think that, like any new form, it's going to take a lot of practice before I can sit down not to 'make an infographic', but to have an idea and sit down to express it, 'in infographic form'.
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