Life: Designed

If you’re new here, I’m working towards creating a comprehensive animated infographic centering around the topic of reproductive rights in the United States. I’m calling my project The Statistics of Autonomy: Reproductive Rights by the Numbers. This is week 4 of 7 of that journey!

The focus of my work this week was visual preparation. Last week I nailed down the content. Now I’m focusing on how I want my final product to look. As I move forward in creating an animated infographic, this is the last big step before I begin my work in After Effects.

What I Accomplished

I worked on developing the look of my animated infographic this week. I developed a visual identity. I collected all the photos, audio, textures, and graphics I will need for my animation. Most importantly, I planned out each frame of my animation. 

Now that nailing down the visuals and planning each frame is complete, I don’t have to make as many decisions in the animation process. This will help save time and reduce the number of times I have to stop to gather materials.  

Storyboarding

The first and most important step was storyboarding. I went through my script and, frame by frame, sketched my vision. As I went, I tried to break down my vision as much as possible so it is clear for future me. 

I broke down each page in my sketchbook to 12 boxes per page. In each box, I sketched specific movements with arrows. With little notes, I wrote down my thoughts about specific things I want to happen in each part. 

This process helped me work through complicated sequences and lay out my ideas on paper. Storyboarding really helps to organize and streamline the animation process. Now when I’m working in After Effects, I have something I can quickly reference instead of going through trial and error and coming up with ideas on the fly. 

Visual Identity

The next step was to develop my visual identity. I knew from the start I wanted the video to look very grunge and feel rebellious. This meant strong typography, bold colors, and lots of texture to avoid it feeling flat. 

For my colors, I knew I wanted something bold with lots of contrast, but would also need some lighter supporting colors. It was important to me that there was strong contrast with pretty much every color combination to allow for more dynamic designs. This is how I landed on my three pinks: a bold hot pink, a light baby pink, and a cotton candy midtone. For neutrals, I knew I did not want to use pure white (#FFFFFF) or black (#000000) at risk of it feeling flat, so I chose a creamy off-white and a charcoal black. 

I chose my typography through Adobe Fonts. I wanted a strong, bold headline/primary typeface, a readable body typeface, and a handwritten third typeface I can use for little notes throughout the animation. 

For my primary typeface, I chose Paccadillo MVB, a condensed slab serif that comes in 3 different fonts. For my secondary typeface, I chose Avenir Next, a basic, readable sans serif with 12 fonts. For my third typeface, I chose Square Peg, a light handwritten font that feels more professional than Comic Sans. 

For my logo, I didn’t do anything too crazy. I wrote out the title with my strong headline typeface in hot pink and used the secondary typeface in black to create some contrast between the title and subhead. I titled the final “S” in statistics to create more movement in the otherwise blocky logo.

Material Collection

The final step was gathering all the materials I noted down in last week’s checklist. This included making icons, gathering photos and audio, and reworking some graphics I got online. 

I gathered: 

• Background music
• Audio of people saying quotes I’ve included
• Sound Effects
• Textures (paper, grains, scratches)
• Photos relating to the topics mentioned in my script
• Protest videos

I made: 

• Audio clips for the quotes I could not find
• Icons
• Graphics to use throughout my video
• Graphs I will not be able to make directly in After Effects
• A paint stroke texture to be used as a transition or background element

I refined: 

• A map of the united states by separating each layer so it’s ready to be put into After Effects

Collecting all of this ahead of time helps me more carefully think through what I will need for my video. It helps me brainstorm what I can create to make the animation more engaging. In the end, it will save me time as I can now quickly access everything I need.

What Came Up This Week

My biggest struggle this week was reworking one of my planned graphics. The original plan was to show how small a part of a whole was through a icon array. The data I’m representing is .46 of 100,000. I would soon learn my original vision was not practical.

Before I tried making this monstrous chart, I made a similar one, this one only representing 16.7 of 1,000. This smaller chart was huge, and I had to rework it a couple times to fit it comfortably in my artboard. As I made this chart, I thought to myself, “If this is 1,000, how am I going to do 100,000?”

After talking through the issue with my boyfriend, we were able to come up with a better solution. We decided on having 10 boxes to represent the 100,000 people. The video would then zoom into one of the boxes to represent 10,000 people, then 1,000, and so on until the statistic is finally visible.

Below is a very rough depiction of what this chart will look like:

Looking Forward

Next week I will finally begin animating my project. The past four weeks of prep have been leading up to this. I’ll be synthesizing my collected data, storyboard, visual identity, and collected materials and translating that into my initial animation. 

Check back next week; we’re just getting moving!