Not An Infographic, A Blog Post

A few months ago, I made a slideshow on the wage gap for my Human Development class, and while I found a preponderance of data regarding women in the workforce, none was more impactful than a particular infographic. Consisting of four side-by-side profile portraits (a white man, white woman, African American woman, and Hispanic woman) with the amount made by each compared to every dollar a white man made, the graphic conveyed the ridiculousness of the wage gap - the only thing differing between each portrait was skin tone and, sometimes, hair length. While working on my E-Learning graphic, I remembered this infographic and was reminded that images are immensely powerful in conveying fact.

           

For this project, I made an infographic about whether social media use has a detrimental effect on academic accomplishment. I was surprised at the number of studies done on the subject;  I expected many, as my question seems obviously worth researching, but only a few major studies had been conducted. These studies had generated few statistics, and most resulted in general conclusions, and this seemingly made it difficult to include findings in a visually pleasing fashion. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I did not necessarily need statistics to make my infographic look powerful, as I mostly included text sections about the conclusions reached by various studies and felt that, looking over my final product, the infographic had not lost its resonance.

           

While designing my infographic, I took several factors into account to choose font, layout, shapes, and color with the goal of making each reflect the graphic's subject matter. First, I used a spindly, wide font to write "social media" and a more classic, varsity-esque font for "academics" (the font itself was actually named "Graduate.")  Throughout the graphic, I used more casual fonts for sections focusing on social media and the more serious, "fancy" fonts for the sections about academics. Because the statistics and statements I was using related the two things, I wanted to emphasize their individual importance as discreet elements of society by justaposing their fonts.

 Further, I used layout to give the infographic a clear progression, dividing it with lines into individual sections. The first box gave general statistics on social media use, and the next boxes numerically connected social media and academic performance, ideally forming a progression in which the reader first understood the presence of media and then its effect.

I also employed simple shapes thoughout, mostly to emphasize the importance of the text, and included several simple social-media emblems to familiarize the content to the reader by presenting well-known images, which they had likely seen before.

Last, I used a consistent color scheme (black, white, blue, yellow, and red) to give the graphic coherency and visually appeal, and I used brighter colors to highlight more important information. By assigning different information different colors within a certain scheme, I hoped to create a visual guide to what was important within the graphic, drawing attention to important information. 

Academics and Social Media Infographic by Harper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.