Home

Prompt:

• Use your phone camera, choose a subject and compose it in various shot sizes and camera angles, while demonstrating your understanding of visual composition.
• Take about 4-6 images.
• State the purposes of using these techniques and how does it affect your audience who perceive your subject.

Introduction

My chosen topic for the infographic is food security and nutrition. I was focusing on how to make the information as easy to digest as possible, especially avoiding big chunks of text.

I used a world map to clearly represent location-related facts, and mapped the same colour intensities to the pie chart underneath it which represents the different proportions of where the undernourished people were from.

To visualise the sudden spike of Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) in 2020 after years of it being relatively constant in the years before, I used a bar graph and made the 2020 bar a different colour from the rest, to bring viewers’ eyes to it.

To show 1 out of 3 people not having access to adequate food, I used a pie chart again, but this time I represented it as a plate of food, with two-thirds of it filled with food, and one-third of it only bits and crumbs of food.

For the statistics of children who suffered from stunting, I visualised the percentage as 1 out of 5, with one child being shorter than the other four.

Lastly, for the section on actions to be done moving forward, I created an icon to represent each of the 6 points, to help viewers digest the information more quickly.

Critique: Learning points

One of the main concerns was that the title of the infographic was not prominent enough, so it was difficult to immediately understand what it is about. Some suggestions include making the title bigger, or putting the title in the red middle section where the children section is at.

Another concern is that the typography on the children section is focusing on the less important information — the exact number — instead of the percentage, which is what was being represented in the 1 out of 5 children visual. The illustration of the children also looked a bit misleading with the line on their heads, so there was a suggestion to add a floor to further emphasise that they are standing on the same ground and one is shorter than the rest.

Upon self-reflection after class, I felt that the overall infographic topic could have been made clearer, such as by having a central/main illustration that summarises the theme. However, this would require reworking almost the entire infographic, so I did not venture into that due to time constraints. Nevertheless, I will still keep this in mind as a learning point.

Improvements

I have enlarged and emphasised the title with a dark colour background block behind it, and I believe that it has helped with the clarity on the infographic’s theme.

I also adjusted the children section to emphasise the “22%” instead of the “149.2 million”, and added some ground below the children.

Workflow: Adobe workspace

Adobe Illustrator

• I used Illustrator to make all the icons and visuals.
• Tools used: Pen tool, Shape Builder tool, Shape tools

Introduction

For this assignment, my concept is an action-movie with Lego characters, and I wanted to challenge myself to use good compositions and angles to communicate the action and adrenaline even with the constraints of static photos — and only 6-9 photos at that — while also telling a story without text.

Storyboard

For the storyboard, I started by allocating the number of frames I want to spend on the beginning, middle and end of the story, to ensure that the pacing made sense. Next, I substantiated the contents of each frame, describing what the purpose of each frame is (as shown by the notes in brown). After that, I started to consider what type of shots would be most effective in communicating the intended message of each frame (as shown by the notes in green). For example, in the first frame, I wanted the shot to be far enough to give context of the environment and the vehicle, or in the third frame, I wanted to have motion blur to show the chaos when the dragon enemy attacks. With all that information, I proceeded to draw out the compositions of the frames I had in mind.

Layout

After the shots were taken, it was time to edit them and arrange them into the A4 format. I opted for a comic book style panel layout, mainly incorporating slanted edges to further emphasize the action element of the photos. I was mindful of the sizes of each shot — I wanted the larger photos to emphasize meaningful parts of the story, and wanted to group related shots together by keeping them in similar sizes and in the same row or column.

Critique & Improvements

The main comment from the critique is that there was insufficient context as to where the side character came from — was he always on the dragon’s back all along, or did he hop in halfway to save the adventurer from the dragon?

A suggestion from my peers and Prof Kai was to add one more shot of the character hopping or landing on the dragon.

I took the suggestion of adding one more shot of the side character jumping on the dragon, and I think it has helped to make the story flow more smoothly, as shown in the improved prototype below.

Workflow with Adobe

Adobe Photoshop

• I used Photoshop to sketch my storyboard

Adobe Lightroom

• I used Lightroom to adjust the colours of the photos, mainly to increase the contrast, which I thought was common in action-themed content.

Adobe Illustrator

• I used Illustrator to arrange the photos in the layout and to manipulate the edges and slant them for the comic book look.

Introduction

My goal for this assignment was to simplify my image by abstracting it to the essentials, only keeping the features that keep it distinguishable and getting rid of noise.

Thought progress

My thought process over the stages are as follows. (Note that this is for the critique submission version.)

Feedback from critique

One comment from my peers was that the jump from stage 4 to 5 was a little too drastic. Another comment from my peers was that it was not very apparent that this is supposed to be a monstera plant, it looks like a bunch of heart shapes.

A comment from Prof Kai was that the silhouette could be clearer if the intersecting lines were cleaned up with the Scissor tool. Another comment from Prof Kai was that a green tint on the line art could help viewers better identify this to be a plant.

Improvements since critique

With those comments in mind, I made changes for stage 4 and 5 as follows.

I decided to bring back some of the details of the holes and veins on the leaf to both stage 4 and 5, with the purpose of helping viewers better identify this as a monstera plant.

I took up the suggestion of cutting away the intersecting part of the lines. This helped to maintain the depth of the leaves from stage 4. I also took up the suggestion of making the line art on the plant part green to further emphasise that this is a plant.

Workflow

The main tools I used were:

• Pen tool
• Layers
• Outline Stroke
• Shape Builder tool

I used the Pen tool and Layers function to trace the shapes and draw the shadows, with the original image in a locked layer underneath the tracing layer. I used the Outline Stroke function and Shape Builder tool to create the negative space around the leaves in stage 3, instead of leaving them as white outlines.