Information Design

The purpose of this slide deck is to provide sufficient visual and verbal information for an audience to quickly grasp concepts. Similarly, this succinct information functions as cues from which a speaker can elaborate. It also conveys my evaluation of the usability and digital accessibility of the flylax.com website, a relevant subject given ADA regulations requiring a technical standard of WCAG 2.1 AA.

The purpose of this infographic is to entertain and satisfy curiosity rather than offer serious instrumental value. The context is a social media post or a web page that a viewer might browse to when pondering the question, “Why are pine nuts so expensive?” The graphic would almost certainly be viewed on a mobile device. So, using a color palette reminiscent of pine nuts, pine trees, and pesto, I used bold elements and a clear signal – up and down arrows – to convey the answer – high demand and limited supply. The “call to action” at the bottom of the graphic offered a useful tip to preserve the costly ingredient.

The project required me to use a black, white, and gray color palette along with the available tools in Inkscape to develop an instructional graphic that answers a question. Here, the question is: “How do you prepare to read an academic text?” As a reading specialist, I am well-acquainted with the objects and relationships for the graphic. The amount of focus needed to perform each step of the process creates some complexity for an under-skilled reader. Such readers tend to jump into the thick of the reading material and do not pay much, if any, attention to the structural features of a text that can help them grasp the gist of it. So, my main goal was to emphasize the scanning of these particular elements.

The project required me to use a black and white minimalist color palette and any number of silhouetted black forms to represent the concepts of increase, stability, equality, and outside using Inkscape. This was an evolution from a previous project where the same ideas had to be conveyed using only four black squares using PowerPoint drawing tools.