Infographic Design: Learn To Create Compelling Graphics from Facts & Data

1. Class Preview: understanding how to work with and create infographics is important for any designer to know. This class will show you how to create and work with infographics to create compelling visuals for otherwise boring fax and data. We will first dive into infographic theory, will review solid examples and understand how to use a wide variety of visual display methods. Next we'll move into Adobe Illustrator will create five unique different graphics to display our fax and data. We will work with a wide variety of illustrator's tools, including three D tool brush tool charting tools and more. These lessons are intermediate level lessons, so some basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator is recommended for the project based section of the class. Finally, you'll be tasked with creating your very own info. Gramick. After taking this class, you'll know how best to take otherwise boring data and make stunning graphics that both communicate the data effectively and beautifully. So let's get started 2. Infographic Theory - What makes for compelling infographic design? : infographics with a visual display of facts, statistics and data in a compelling layout that not only looks graphically appealing but also is able to effectively communicate both complex and simple data sets. A lot of people think of the visual side of infographics. How does it look? But more importantly, it needs to display the facts and figures in a way the viewer can understand fairly quickly . It should never be too complex to figure out there is a balance and you to strike. As a designer who creates infographics, you need to balance both creativity and visual appeal with practicality and science. Most designed jobs that are infographic in nature require you to work with sometimes complex figures as well as financial figures. The most common type of infographic work includes doing annual reports, financial reports for companies who want to display their data and a non boring or exciting way. It may also be a nonprofit wanting to break down what they accomplished this year with its donations, and these next few lessons were going to talk about how to make compelling info graphics and know what type of charm, symbol or graphic to use in different situations, then my time doing infographics for clients. Clients would normally send me a big word document full of data, facts and figures, usually around 20 lines of uninspiring text that it needs to make come alive and be bright graphic that clearly communicates the clients and gold to the viewer. Like with any type of design work, we want to start off with basic layout and blocking of her main elements. This will help us break down the list into what's most important so we can have a sense of hierarchy in the design, meaning that most important items air highlighted by even being bigger, perhaps highlighted with a different color. If I had 10 different fax, I wanted display in a visually appealing way. Let's say pie charts as they deal with percentages, and I made them all the same size. They would all compete for attention and make the design peaceful flat on its purpose. If I were to increase the size of one or more of the interesting facts or figures or charts and had varying ways that displaying the other fax and makes for a more interesting infographic full of life and begging to be looked at. Same goes for color. A darker themed infographic can change the mood or tone of the design, using cool tone colors for the majority of the infographic and having a very important highlighted items be a warmer color can help of contrast. Contrast is critical and integrated design, as there could be a huge amount of data needing to be squeezed in a very small space. Having enough contrast with your elements can help the user further breakdown information or important areas of the graphic. For instance, Hi Con design is another great asset. You can use an infographic creation. Some require custom icons, and these some icons can be purchased or downloaded to adapter work or strike a balance between symbols and type. Creating icons yourself on a vector program like Adobe Illustrator or affinity designer gives you the chance to create themed icons that strike a similar style with the charts and graphics. You have, for example, having icons that have a similar stroke weight compared to the line graphics used. There are so many different ways to display facts and figures and infographics. How do you know whether you should use a pie chart or a line graph. Let's work through a few examples to see the best practices in action. Here is a line of data we need to create a visual charter graph for for our infographic, 65% of millennials prefer avocado toast over bacon for breakfast. What if we visualize this data using a bar chart? It seems to communicate our data set well. What if we switched it up and tried a pie chart format? Both the bar in the pie charts do a great job of simplifying the data, but the pie chart does it in a much more compact way. Percentages tend to do well in a pie chart style format. Let's add to this a bit further and added custom icon and labels to the graph. Now let's add a themed color to highlight them or important majority number in the pie graph. And now we're getting somewhere. Let's try another example. Here's the next piece of data we need to work with this time. Six different items. This is degrees earned by 2020 graduates in a business program. We can use our trusty pie chart. It does deal with the percentages breakdown, but we have a problem here. There's not a lot of differentiation or variety and our percentages. We have three data points that all have the same 20% number. Make us making this chart a little less exciting to look at. There is something called a then diagram, where you could see overlapping bubbles or circles. The size of the bubble or circle is relational to the other bubbles or data sets and the size. So if we had a bubble that is 20% and another one that is 10% than the 10% bubble will be half the size of the 20% bubble. I'm going to lay out our five data sets using a Venn diagram, lay out. What do you think? Is this more compelling of a layout or next example? What if we create a chart that also took time is a factor. For instance, the status set the average time to complete a marathon based on age and time. In this case, we have two different axes. We have our age data set, and we have our second set that rates time is a factor. We can't do pie charts because we don't have an age broken down into the amount of people would just have an average number. In this case, I'm going to share with you a great resource. Called the Viz Data Viz Project, this website allows you to breeze through most of our different data visualization methods available, and you could decide the best way to communicate your data set in the most compelling way possible. And, yes, it's more than one right way to display data. Perhaps an angular gauge might make this a compelling design if I put each age group in its own chart like the example you see below, I'm looking at this website list for other ideas we can try out. I'm thinking this pick Toral stack chart with the Y axis being time that gets longer, the more you move closer to. The head of the runner looks compelling. We can have. The age is broken down by a different color shade, moving up the runner. There is also the traditional bar graph with both Hawaiian and X axis. That could work well here, too, so there's many different options, and your job as a designer is to make thes charts a visual treat enticing but also keeping that data set easy to understand by the viewer. Let's do one more example. Data set. This one involves the numbers of cookies consumed if given unlimited access. And so this is broken down by age and how many cookies they consume based on their age. We can make this more visually compelling by using icons to communicate or data set. We can build this using a stack of cookies and each stack, moving higher or lower relative to each other, just like our been diagram. Example. Prior when data sets start to get too large, let's say 12 different points. Now certain icons or pictorial graphs can start to get too busy and fall apart. So it really depends on how many things lay out in the end or how many data sets you have. You want to avoid graphic overload. Looking back at our website resource. Perhaps a waffle chart might work better for the 10 data samples. More like this example of having our cookie icon be in the background instead of 10 different stacks of cookies repeated 10 times. As you can see, there's so many different ways to display data And sometimes there's more than one right way, and your job is to find the best combinations of charts, graphics, visual displays, icons to create a unified, interesting infographic. Her last topic for this lesson is creating our theme. You may have several different types of charts displayed on one page as a designer confined ways to unify the charts, graphics and icons by having a similar font style liner, stroke, thickness and, of course, of thematic color. Theme remembered have strong layout hierarchy when putting together infographics, providing a central graphic that ties everything together. Like I mentioned before, I like to block out my infographics with rough gray blocks and charts so I can get a good idea of how much space each data set will take up and how much room I have to play around with for larger graphics, photos and icons. The best way to work through this process is to work on real world examples. We're going to do just that in the next coming. Few lessons will tackle this long list of uninspiring quotes, backs and figures, and we hope to turn this into something visually exciting that will make her clients happy and our readers to 3. Getting Setup - Blocking and Layout: So here we are in Adobe Illustrator. We're gonna take a crack at our infographic and I thought I'd do a darker seemed info graphics so we can have pops of color on, went ahead and just had a new layer and just kind of did a very subtle radiant of different kinds of dark grays to kind of set the mood and tone for a background. I also have some different jewel tones and different bright colors that would really pop out on a dark background kind of set, although those who might change by the time we're done doing our infographics. But it's good to kind of get started with an idea of colors and some type this using some typical Helvetica typeface because it's not only easy to use, but the numbers look good as well. And so kind of picking out your typeface for your infographics to conceal have just a standard Helvetica. Ah, sometimes if you use one of my favorite typefaces, let's say railway. Sometimes they have issues with numbers, and when you're working with infographics is very number Hebert heavy. So you want to make sure you have a typeface that's gonna look great with the numbers used . So if you do this 12345 Notice how the three in the forego past the baseline It doesn't have kind of an even look like Helvetica would have when you go ahead and just adapt this so you can kind of see the difference between, um, how this stays on the baseline and it looks a lot more clean when it comes to infographics . So that's that's kind of something to think about when you're looking at the type face, you got to choose for your infographics. The numbers are almost more important than the letters. So let's go ahead and get started. We're gonna do some basic layout and blocking of our elements. We're gonna go open up that word document that has all of the kind of different fax we're gonna work on with this project. You can download that so you can have all these random fax or it's gonna copy and paste that into Adobe Illustrator and we could slide that off to the side. We're gonna go ahead and see how many we have. So I have 1234567 different random facts. This will kind of be a random infographic kind of theme. It's not going to necessarily talk about one thing, but it's gonna go over different few fax so that we can do different types of statistics. So we have seven different items. It looks like we haven't eighth, but that's a large. It looks like it could be a more of a bar graph or a line graph. So we want to make sure we have a lot of room for that one. So let's have our title. We're gonna have our title is gonna be the big page of random infographics. So that title is gonna go here. You do it right here in the middle. That could look really nice. And this is what blocking and layout is all about. Us figuring out what we think might look best. And that can change quite frequently as we figure this out. So that could be a good place for a tile right here in the middle. Or we can have the infographics spread around. So I'm assuming the other seven just based looking at the figures and kind of seeing okay, by the age of 60 they're very simple statistics and facts and figures. So I'm thinking when we have seven simple ones, we kind of just have different varying boxes. You can always hold down, option and dragged, go ahead and duplicate your box and make it easier. We have seven different infographics to fit in. So this is great because we can see how much room we have for each infographic as we do them, we don't have to do the infographics. And then all of a sudden we realize we didn't have enough room to fit in the 7th 1 And then Now it's a cram design and we wanna have room for our bottom one, which is going to be Go ahead, make these a small show you the final one. I've already kind of figured out the layout, but I'm just kind of showing you how I go through this process. We have this big line graph that we're gonna have to do. Let's go ahead and hold down option and make a bigger area for the line graph. We'll make sure we have enough room for that, and this may mean we need to make our title a bit smaller. So it can have room for info graphics. That's why blocking ahead of time. It's so critical because you can avoid having to go back and do a lot of modifications because you've already kind of set a plan in place for your design. So I know it's not perfect, but there's kind of seven different specs. We have our eighth larger line graph, and we have a title. So we have all over main elements plucked out. Let's get to the fun part. We're going to do these one at a time. We're gonna start with the top and work our way down. So as you could see, I spend a few moments kind of fine tuning. Our layout just kind of find the right balance and making sure certain elements kind of fit nicely in different areas. And we had different variations of sizes. So let's get started with our 1st 1 So our 1st 1 is by the age of 60 most people have lost 50% of their taste buds. Well, I didn't know that. That's kind of a neat fact. So start to break this down and figure out the best way to visually present this So this is a very easy one. It's a nice 50. 50 split. Ah, the first thing that comes to my mind is kind of a part pie chart or kind of something that split in half. So I thought, Let's do kind of a pie chart. But instead of doing a full circle, let's kind of do a more streamlined, modern skinny ah pie chart. And I'll go ahead and show you an example here of kind of what I'm talking about. A little bit more modern, you don't have the whole center filled in, doesn't take up much space. So how we're gonna do this is we're gonna draw simple circle and we're just gonna make it a stroke. So we're doing white stroke. Let's go ahead and make this about the size that we want to make it. So maybe about that size would be slightly bigger. And let's increase our stroke a little bit. We don't want to have it too thick. We don't want it to be too chunky. That could work with certain instances, but I think I want to incorporate a photo into this one. I want this to be very clean because It's a very simple fact. So you go ahead and reduce this. Maybe find the right stroke. I wanted to be that skinny modern look. So perhaps maybe 17. In this case, this is a 8.5 by 11 inch document. Just just so you know, the size of this total documents and give us a sense of what 17 points means relative to the document. Okay, so that's a good size. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna make this a solid color, I think. Right now, grab that, Grady int I was clicking down here and making it a solid color. So now that we have a dozen solid color, what I want to do is cut this in half so we could have won the top side one color in the bottom side. Another. So the best way to do that is using the shape color tool. We can also use the Pathfinder tool bringing to the shape color tool. In this instance, I'm gonna go and draw boxes. How it could help cut this in half. You make this a different color so we don't get lost with all our different shapes. That's kind of where I wanted to be. Cut. Bring it down a little bit. So now I'm gonna go ahead and switch it back to a fills. Go ahead and cut it out and highlight both of these and grab the shape older tool. And the first thing I want to do is I want to make sure I outlined my path. So you notice I still I'm able to edit the stroke and this and I need to go ahead and outline the path. So I'm gonna go to object path, outline the stroke, and so it's gonna go ahead and outline it. I can no longer edit it, but that's OK, because we already go ahead and cut it out. So it's like both objects gonna go over here to my shape builder tool. And instead of adding I'm going to subtract from this, I want to punch these two elements out. So I'm gonna hold down the option key and gonna punch out this outside, and I'm gonna punch out this inside. So just holding down that option key, I believe it's the command or old key on the windows and go ahead and select. So I have my original circle, and then I have this shape that I cut out. And so now I have two different shapes that I could make two different colors. So let's go ahead and do that. I picked out two colors I thought would look really good on a black background kind of some Grady INTs. You can download that and find that where I have the color Swatch is going to the top. Let's do the top a purple and with ah, Adobe illustrator, you can always grab ingredient tool and kind of find the right shading kind of the right direction for that particular piece. And I'm gonna go ahead and grab the green and get my grading and tool and try to find the right shading for that, approach it at any angle you'd like whatever you think would look good. So now we have a little pie chart. But what I'd like to do is that's a nice, soft, rounded edges, kind of give it a little bit more modern, sleek appearance over. To do that next 4. Pie Chart Project: so I wanna have that nice, rounded pill shaped to give it the modern look. So there's a couple ways we can go about this, Um, under try this method where I can add, I'm just going over to add an anchor point. And I'm just gonna add anchor point right there in the middle and I'm gonna get my direct selection tools. Go push that up a little bit. Where went the curve to start, and then you can take this and drag it down and make it round it. You could do that method, or you can grab the curvature tool and only have to do is double click that top and will convert it to a rounded shape. Our double click he converted back. So if you kind of want the arrow look, you could just keep it that way. Or, if you want the soft pill looked, just double click and you'll have that added, were to do the same thing on the other side and then take our curvature tool. And there's a lot of different ways to do this. Lots of different ways to skin a cat when it comes to doing design work If you have a better, better method, please go for it. But this is just one that worked out best here. So we have the basics over Infographic here and loaded in. I thought that since this is such a simple fact, what I think would really work well is ah, photo of some sort, maybe a black and white, to counter all the different colors we have going on. So a cool black and white photo that really kind of has a tongue, perhaps, Maybe one that's sticking out. And I'm gonna go over the pixels dot com, which is where I find a lot of my free photos I can use. And I went ahead and downloaded this one right here, and I wanted a photo shop, but I punched out the background because I'm gonna be putting it on the doubt. Dark background. So I did some ways clever ways of cutting all that out, which I can go over and other lessons and other classes. But I'm gonna bring that in. As you can see, I made this photo black and wide. I up the contrast a little bit to provide more of a pop out against the dark background, and I thought I'd be need to go ahead and use this. I thought I could have her kind of coming out of the circle like she's inside the circle. So maybe having her hair coming on top, but having her corrupt here on the bottom, so it almost looks like she's coming out of the circle was kind of adding, um kind of some more interesting design elements to make this somewhat kind of simple, boring fact kind of really stand out and be kind of visually stunning. So let's go ahead and get her into the circle. Is Quinn sizer up dragger? And there we can see kind of where we want her hair to go. We don't want are so big that she's overwhelming the 50 50 pie. We don't want her so small that her hair doesn't get a chance to kind of come out and really make it look like a three d piece. So let's make it a little bit bigger, perhaps, or here goes all the way out above this area, this top area, and so let's Cropper. So let's grab our Ellipse tool and let's just doesn't have to be exact. As long as you're kind of close, go ahead and bring our lips still here. We want to crop her right about there's find the right period a cropper. So here's the thing. We want to crop this out, but we don't want a crop. Your hair, one her hair to remain on top. So you take the direct selection tool and bring this up. Click it. Bring it up. You want to keep that here? Kind of an odd thing we're we're doing here. But we couldn't keep all that hair. I might need to add a anchor point. Here we go. So I wanted to keep kind of crop, that area, but I wanted to keep her hair on top. Two years kind of our odd shape. We made to kind of almost like an egg shape. I'm gonna go ahead and make that a different colors. You can kind of see, So we're gonna do a clipping mask going to select our top layer selector photo underneath, get a right click, and do a very simple clipping mask. That one hadn't clipped her. And always take the direct selection tools, any clipping mask you can always go back and adjust it after you've clipped it. So now we ever popping out. We have the dynamic colors. We kind of have the 50 50. We can ship this anyway. We want to go ahead and group these together. We wanted to, and we can spend these. So maybe they're not just half and half that. Maybe they kind of have a diagonal presentation and I shakes it up a little bit, or you can keep it half and half. So it's kind of more clear that it is a 50%. So that's up to you as the infographic designer, what you think communicates 50% the most. I kind of like a little bit of a diagonal twist to it just to kind of show a more dynamic pop. It still looks like 50% to me. So let's add the 50% somewhere on here. We really want to communicate that very clearly, so let's go ahead and grab this 15 50%. We have our Helvetica bold on, and we have appears kind of some guidance we have for typography. I'm gonna make that a little bit bigger and white. Let's find a place we can place this that doesn't distract from her face. So we can probably get away with putting our hair. It's nice high contrast, so that's dark. This is light. I don't want it too close to her eyes because I don't want the eyes in this to compete. So that's gonna move that a little bit higher up and maybe add a little bit of drop shadow , maybe go into the character panel and kind of reduced the tracking a little bit. Maybe. Ah, a negative. 25% so kind of closes in the letters. The gaps between the letters cler the numbers close is a little bit, so it's a little bit tighter, very subtle stuff here we're talking about. Let's do a nice long cast, a shadow in the semi drop shadow options panel and let's do a preview and let's it's already kind of cast pretty far out. Um, pretty high capacity just helps dark and around it, so it really stands out a longer here. But it's not obvious that it's a drop shadow. It has a lot of distance to it. It's got a lot of blur to it, so it's not like you see this super stark drop shadow. It looks more kind of blended in over top of her and same thing for here. We can even add a drop shadow on this top layer when goto effect, apply the same drop shadow. Take a look at the preview. Kind of adds a drop shadow down there, which looks really lovely. Maybe reduce it a little bit. Maybe 44%. So it's not so strong. Click OK, is that kind of added a nice little drop shadow effect down there just once again, adding more of that layered kind of interactive. It's not just a flat kind of design, there's layers. There's their shadows, that that type of thing, we'll do the same thing with the top one. I'm not sure if it'll look is good, but go and try it out. So that's great. We can even apply it to her. But then again, it might do the drop shadow right there, so that could be a neat look. That's another kind of shadow here that you can use or you can just have it plain. So now we need to add the text because we have 50% but 50% What? It's nothing without the rest of the sentence. So we could go ahead and bring this in, mused copy and paste it just in case I want to play and experiment with it. So let's make this white okay so we can have this straight across his two lines. Maybe center, align it. We just have it here. We could have it stacked with several lines of type. And this is going to depend on how are blocking and lay out for the rest of the document goes so we could have something simple like this, and that could be the same look throughout all the rest of the document, and that's great. But I thought, you know, this is a very dynamic peace. We got a lot of colors going on. Let's try something a little bit more graphically challenging. Let's do a type on path all the way around a circle do that's we're gonna do a circle about the same with as our little pie graph here. Okay, so now I'm just gonna copy and paste is and put this all on the same line, or I guess I have it up here. That's nice. I can always slide that over, just in case. I don't like this new method and then go down to type on path and go and click anywhere on the line and paste it, See how it looks. So what? I want to do it. I don't want all bold text. I don't want a mobile tech because I think we already have a very bold picture and a very bold 50%. So let's make this whites. You can see what I have here. Let's make this a regular weight or even a lightweight just like this and notice how it's on the outside of the circle. I'd like to bring it on the inside of the circle so I can put it on the bottom of the Texan . It's not gonna read backwards. Second, rotate this and then now it reads backwards and are upside down. We don't want to have that. It was gonna go over here to reach right to this little area, and it's shifted inside. That could be a little tricky sometimes, but I switch it to the inside. Let's place it on, like there might need to make some adjustments. And with the size, this is a 8.5 by 11 inch document. So you might have. You might use the metric system. You might have different sizes, but for this case, usually nine points works really well with readability. Don't really wanna have text below eight. So why don't we do one up from that and do nine points? And that should give us a lot more room to work with their type That really reduced the size quite a bit. I want to make sure we have it halfway. You know, it might be able to get away with it being just a little bit bigger. That's never gonna hurt with readability. You're OK, so we just want to do a little optical adjustment. Make sure it's halfway. I might need to just adjust it a little bit, but it's about even on both sides, and we can highlight a particular item. So we want a highlight 50% or want to highlight taste buds. I think the most important ward here is taste buds, that that's what we're talking about. That's what the facts about. I think we could even make that type a little bigger to really emphasize it and also change the weight to make it boulder and going a step further. We can even make this a green or a purple, really kind of bring it out. So I'm going to double click this and see if I can't find a matching green. And so notice the taste buds really come out 50% taste buds. I know that this infographic immediately is talking about taste buds and something about 50% so I'm already starting to put it together without reading it. That's exactly the power of Infographics is understanding what it is before actually reading the whole thing. Let's make this a little bit bigger and just do some little minor tweaks and adjustments to see if we can't make it a little better. But I think just in what about 15 minutes were able to put together this one, we've got several more to go going to try different methods and different techniques all throughout this to kind of, uh show you different ways you can present infographics, so this is a very simple one. As we work through these, some of these get a little more complex especially the ones with large numbers who can find creative ways to present large numbers that make it look a little more enticing. 5. Icon Based Project: Now it's time for a 2nd 1 this one. It's approximately 1/3 of the population can't snap your fingers. Which doesn't surprise me because it took me a long time to figure out how to snap mine. So now we're dealing with a fraction eso. There's different ways we can present this. Visually, I think the most interesting way. And since there's only broken into thirds basically one out of three, it's really easy to graphically show. If this was 23 out of 87 it might be a little bit more challenging to show. But since is very simple. I thought about having three snapping finger icons. We go ahead and draw this and then have a simple kind of phrase below it. So kind of a very simple, pictorial way to show off this statistic. So what we need to do is find snapping hand icon. We've used picture in the previous one, so let's shake it up a little bit and use icon so we can draw our own hand using the pin tool. But to save time, I went ahead and found this great vector resource. Go ahead and download. It doesn't have a snapping person snapping their fingers because it's really hard to illustrate. But we're going to do that ourselves. We're gonna go and open up this document and grab this icon right here, and we're gonna modify it. So I have this over here copy and paste it and make it a lighter color so I can see what I'm doing. We're gonna make this a snapping fingers were gonna kind of do it up like you would kind of present your hand to snap, and we're gonna add a couple little kind of squiggly lines to indicate sound. And so the best way to do that to make it look like organic, little hand drawn, squiggly lines. I'm gonna grab the brush tool over here in a moment. But it's also gonna make sure I have the brush window open so I can change the brush size so the brush size is pretty big us. We don't need that. Let's go ahead and get a nice light color, and we're going to reduce the brush size a little bit. So when you have the brush, um, open panel open, you'll be able to change the stroke size. So it's 2.25 appear and it made it a little bit smaller. Let's continue to make it smaller. We'll zoom in so we can do this. We do five old squiggly lines, this 12345 And that just indicates the snapping sound. We can also indicated from kind of down here, that might make a little more sense. What's kind of rethink this a little bit? Now that I'm seeing it in real life, let's kind of make it come from the phone. But that's where you here, the snapping. As you could see, it took me a lot of noodling to find the right kind of flow for the the indication of the snapping sound from the finger. But I think I got it. If I want to go ahead and select, these is what we created with the paint brush tool. Let's go ahead and go to Pam Object Path. What's going outlined? Stroke on that. So that's now when I scale it up or down, it's not gonna change in size. Give us any problems, so now I can go ahead and select these. Take her eyedropper tool and sample are lighter color, so Now we have our icons. Got a group that together so I can ship these round, so this one will be a lot more simple to do. We're gonna do three different ones. We're gonna hold down the option key drag release, drag release, and we're just gonna do three different icons. We're gonna make sure they're aligned properly. Some just appear in my line panel. Could align them you different ways. Subs make sure I do the horizontal distribute center another all the line properly. So let's do the 1st 1 We could do the middle one a different color, but I think the 1st 1 kind of makes it more obvious that it's a fraction. So now we can can go to our color palette and see if there's a nice, bright, vivid color we can use for this. Perhaps, maybe a dark orange that kind of really pops out there. So that's kind of it when it comes to kind of displaying the smoke and make it a little bit bigger and go ahead and bring in our type, hearing a copy and paste it. So I still have the original and it is the eyedropper tool to see if I can sample are the size of the one we just did. And the colors just to kind of be consistent with our type. Okay. And so weaken, of course. Highlight certain ones a 1/3. Ah, we can make this a fraction showed as a fraction. Instead of just saying 1/3 we actually have a fraction. So we can do that. I'm gonna create my own fraction here. Uh, make that bold. Wait, We can do it. A fraction. A traditional way we could do a diagonal. However, you want to show a fraction. I was doing a simple 1/3 fraction. Make that thicker. Maybe a little shorter. Make sure all these air aligned in the center make it smaller. So in terms of position, we can make that diagonal that might be able to make it more streamlined. So now I can kind of be an icon here. This could even be in the orange circle to highlight the fact that that's the one out of the three people in the population that can't snap their fingers. Make that white is trying to find high contrast items. Proctor's ingredient that has orange in it that might look a little softer, so I'm just getting one that has a little bit of a softer Grady Int tone to it. What could do style I, we could really style eyes is as much as you want to go in, get around the corners just a little bit. Just have the direct selection tooling around corners there instead of a sharp. It's got a nice pill shape kind of matches the pill shaped we've been doing. I can even do that with my type. I can right click, create outlines. I can even soften the edges of my type, doing the same method, grabbing the direct selection tool and softening my type just a little bit so I could see the type of softened. Maybe I don't need to soften it quite as much, just the tiniest little bit. So maybe we can make this that softer, grading it tone kind of get it to match. So approximately 1/3 of the population can't snap their fingers. So that's the more important thing to highlight. So let's get our eyedropper tool and sample what we had over here. It will be green, but we can always tweak the color. It's tweaked the color and make it kind of that orange color that we see. So now it could play around with type to see what looks better with into kind of a staggered presentation with their lines, you could make a bigger I know that will kind of be different than what we had before was going bring our other one back in so that we can see how they live together. So that's the 1st 1 And this is the second winsome kind of seeing. I like the snapping fingers, but this thing is definitely not jiving, not working. That's okay, So perhaps we can just stick with making this a different color. That's why it's great to kind of see these together so you can have Panova a matching theme . We could even do the same. Coloring doesn't have to be different colors, just kind of doing that to show you variety, but we can adapt this green or the purple so that all infographics will match and color, which is important, and maybe that stays white. Maybe the line is green. 1/3. I think we can play with this quite a bit going to spend a few minutes to try to figure out this fraction, which the best layout for that and maybe kind of fine tune colors. But overall, I like the idea of having the three different icons represent the fraction. I think that's a lot better than just showing a fraction kind of shows you a visual image of that. So I spent about 15 additional minutes tweaking the layout and it came up with this. I decided to keep kind of with circular theme. We don't have to do that for everyone, but I have this little no symbol that I created is just a circle and a line with Cem six strokes and just kind of made it really blend into the background, but yet still communicate that. No, that this is 1/3 that cannot snap their fingers so kind of reemphasizing what the 1/3 part of the fraction was, which is cannot. So probably 1/3 of the population cannot snap. Their fingers are highlighted, snap their fingers. I'm keeping everything that relates to the one one out of the three in orange so they can all connect the one finger. The one number one, and then the words so connecting all those with color and not using too much color to distract but really kind of honing in trying to communicate, communicate This is clearly as possible. So that's how we got to kind of this one. We're gonna be ready for the 3rd 1 could maybe do some different things and different approaches. Let's kind of check out what it is. The state of Florida is bigger than England. So once again, we can do kind of a comparison this time can actually do on scale. Way could find some vector images of England and Florida. Lay them over top of each other, Try to find it to scale if we can kind of do kind of an interesting take on that one. 6. Showing Scale - Comparing Sizes: for next statistic. The state of Florida is bigger than England, so kind of a very simple quote. How do we make this a little bit more visual? So I thought, Let's go ahead and do an actual visual comparison. We can find a vector graphic of the state of Florida and a vector graphic of the country of England and see if we can't kind of get some kind of visual appearing here because that'll work a lot better than just a regular sentence. So I actually downloaded a couple of great vector graphics, and I'll put the resource links and the resource guide. You can download that and and find these icons s. This is Florida. This is a pretty simple icons going on group it, and I agree. But again, sometimes you have to one group. He's quite a bit there would go. I have Florida. I'm just gonna copy and paste Florida on in here and go ahead and make a lighter color. And let's grab England. So I have the whole United Kingdom. We're gonna find a way to isolate that here in a second eso a lot of times, and I wanted to address this when you download vector graphics. First of all, make sure you have the rights to use it or you need to get proper credit. So this was from free pick, and you know, I'll make sure ill get proper credits in the links. But in time used kind of a free resource, make sure you give proper credits or you purchase it if you need to get a premium license. So a lot of times these graphics will not be exactly how you need them. So what I need is I need a solid graphic. I don't need the lines or the outlines, but since you're great at using Adobe Illustrator, it'll be a breeze. So let's go and highlight this and let's go in, Turn off strokes. I'm gonna go down here to my stroke, Phil, and let's just go ahead in the gate, all of that. And so now we have a nice, smooth graphic. So now I have one objects. Let's go ahead and copy the whole United Kingdom and popped him in here. It's making slightly different color. It's Goto Phil, just so we can kind of see the difference. Hold down shift and scale it down. So one thing we need to do is we need to figure out how much bigger Florida is to England. And we need to separate England from the United Kingdom because it doesn't say the United Kingdom. So we also want to make sure we're statistically and scientifically accurate. So I'm gonna go do some comparisons and try to find what is the right scale, and I will be right back. So is able to find the right scale. I literally just put how much bigger is Florida than England? And there's some great Google resource is, and some images where I can kind of find the right fitting. Um, so now we need to figure out how to arrange this visually to kind of see the comparison. So I want to kind of tuck this in. I see this nice kind of clear cut out area and kind of slide the United Kingdom a little bit underneath here, kind of see how they can kind of compare a little bit. And if it goes over, that's okay. We're gonna end up isolating England here in a moment. So now let's go ahead, apply some nice colors. We already have some colors and some really cool, greedy int lighter Grady int jewel tones that we have your arms could take the eyedropper tool and go ahead and apply a couple of those. And let's go ahead and make the United Kingdom a nice bright orange. So there's a nice contrast between the green and the, um, the orange. So I just go take migrating to on a smooth that out, make sure it's all the same graphic. You don't see the individual counties, or however it was divided into cities. And let's go ahead and make this a more smooth and do nice, long drawn out radiant so it doesn't look like obvious. Grady. It's kind of more of a very subtle transition, just maybe a little bit darker. So now we need to isolate England. So England is only gonna be the bottom half of the right. So let's go ahead. Drag this out real quick and we can do some simple cropping. We could probably use, Ah, the rectangle tool and let's see where we want to have it corrupt. It's not gonna be exact. So if you're from the UK or like it's more North but this will just kind of be a rough estimate. For now, you can probably find more accurate maps of where England begins and where Scotland ends. So I have this thing could go and make it a different color. I'm going to simply kind of cut this out. We're gonna go in, highlight both, and I'm going to right click and do make clipping mask And what I'm gonna do now as I'm gonna isolate it a little bit further cause I don't want Ireland in there, so I'm gonna see if I can't. Um if we just do the pin tool and kind of draw more accurate cut out there we go. So I must go draw shape over that that I want to be able to isolate. Gonna select both of them. I can, Right click, and I'm gonna just go ahead and make clipping mask. So there, that is. So I have that isolated we can bring in our original graphic of, um bring this back in. We can overlay it and make it darker so that they can see kind of where they're located because you rarely see England isolated from United Kingdom. So it be nice to kind of keep that these air. There's little infographic things you really gotta think like the viewer. What are they gonna be used to seeing what's gonna help them digest its information and so thinking about, you know, kind of ways we can present this in a way that you'd like to see it in the way that you would understand. It's kind of the key to great infographic design, so I just need to go in. I'm just gonna take the direct selection tool kind of adjust my cropping there just a little bit better. I could also cut it out using the shape builder tool. But since the a graphic was a little bit more complex of little crossovers, I decided not to worry about that and do something more simple. So now I'm gonna bring Florida on the top and let's see if I can't find a better color spine, find a little bit of a color that matches the background but is a little bit lighter. Just like that, Mrs. Find the best way to overlap these. And let's also add a punch of drop shadow sums go to go back and do our drop shadow here. It's got a stylized drop. Shadows do a nice, deep dark drop. Shadow it 75% to do a little preview to see how it looks. Maybe back that off to about 44%. I don't wanna have it too overwhelming. So just a little. That drop shadow really helps that Florida pop out over the UK can really compare the two. So I'm just gonna continue to mess around with the layout and the next we're gonna focus on the actual type and see what's the best way to present this type and said It is having like , That's quite boring, let's say kind of user type as a way to also label the map, and you kind of see what I mean when we get there. So with infographics, he never want to take up too much room because usually you have 10 other maybe visuals or graphics. You also have to fit around it or on this particular page. Do you want to be a tight as you can with space and so conserving space? So, in this case, instead of having a separate line, I'm kind of gonna integrate this and labelling and as well. So the state of Florida and ah highlighted Florida with the same color so that there's a color connection is bigger than England and there's the color connection there. So we're just gonna do a simple stroke. I'm just gonna grab the pin tool, or we're just gonna do a nice green line. Go ahead, make that green Grady int line. I got to go to my stroke panel. Let's make it a nice, chunky line and let's smooth out. Just do around Capitol, give a nice round cap and given a nice polish look and let me see if I can't flip that green to stroke, you can go back and add that cap, and there we go. So there's that line, and we can add another line of the similar color to this one right down here that their eyes were drawn to the correct location. Not everybody knows their geography. You can always assume people know what you know, and let's do a nice round of Kappa. The Gardi have that set, so there we go. That's a very simple graphic weaken Miami make get away with making the type a little bit bigger. Just depends on how much room you have. I was just trying to match Some of the font sizes I have elsewhere are going to get rid of that extra stuff over here, and that's it. So that's kind of a nice visual comparison. Very easy, very straight forward. And they're still able to kind of see where they're at. They know that's the United Kingdom, cause we left that in there for them so that they can really kind of know where they are geographically and compare very easily. That was a quick fund. When the next one, we're going to get into pie charts and we're gonna find a way to use the pie chart tool, an adobe illustrator to make perfectly section pie sections so that we can have mathematically correct pie charts. And we're gonna make a do a little three D spin on it at some radiance and trying to make it a visually appearing, appealing pie chart. So we're doing that next 7. Complex Pie Chart: So this is a sample of the pie chart. We're going to recreate its the breakdown of the federal US spending by category 2.45 trillion. I think that's the 2015 numbers. I found it on Google, but I created this chart, but I'm gonna show you kind of the process. I went due to create a very accurate pie chart. So with pie charts, especially when you start to get three or more different slices of the pie, it starts to get harder to guess. What does a 48% of the pie look like? What does the 5% of the pie look like? You really want to be accurate with? How you're displaying your visual information is where the science part comes into infographics. So you're gonna need to use some kind of tool. You can actually do this and excel. But Adobe Illustrator has a fantastic tool for this. You're gonna go down in your tools. If you don't see it listed your toolbar, you probably don't. It's usually hidden. Let's go ahead and call it up down here into the edit toolbar section. You click on here, gonna find his course of 2019 version as this is filmed of illustrator, and there's all sorts of different tools you can use. We're gonna use the pie graph tool, which I already haven't selected, and I wouldn't hadn't dragged it right into my tool bar. So go ahead and access that now. So if we haven't used to me the built in adobe graphing and charting tools, you're in luck. So let's go ahead and select our pie graph tool. We haven't selected right here. And we're gonna go ahead and draw where, What? We think the size ought to be for our pie graphs or it's gonna go ahead and click it and drag, and it's gonna be able to load it. This we're gonna load in the data just like you would and excel we're not going to do. We're gonna columns across. We're not gonna do Rose. And we can you I'll show you why you can do Rose and how that could be beneficial. But for this case, we're going to do columns. We're gonna go pop into our ah word document and go ahead and type in our information. So we have a 45 38 48 to 1 to 2%. You could do this with any. We can't even grab your own statist if you don't have to do the ones that I provided. So let's go ahead and type that and I'm gonna type it in by in order. So you start with the largest and go the smallest cause you don't want to put your largest pie slice next to your smallest and then another large one. You want to kind of go in order from largest all the way down to smallest because that's the way it's gonna load the pie slices. So let's start with the largest, which is 48 38 and we're gonna go ahead and click on this little check mark, and it's gonna automatically create the pie slices for us. Awesome! Yea, that makes life so much easier starting to go ahead and click on here and it has kind of this stroke to it kind of has this little small stroke and I don't like this whole thin strokes were to do something different with it. Some schools go select my stroke over here and just negate that and get it to none. So now I have a nice clean grab. So when we're done with this and what's great about this is this is 100% accurate. I know that is Ah, 5% slice of the pie. I can feel comfortable statistically showing that and being representing that. So at any time, if you want to update kind of the numbers, if you want at another pie slice, make it more complicated. Whatever you need to do, you can always has change that right here and we'll update it Live for you. So we can kind of make this a little bit more dynamic because right now, this is kind of boring pie chart that you would see in any kind of boring financial statement. So let's spice it up just a little bit with color, maybe a little bit of a three D jazz to it. So right now, when I right click, I have everything Great out. Have everything great out here. I can't seem to kind of isolate it. So we're gonna have to do is we would have to close out school box, and we gotta feel like we're really confident with those numbers were kind of done tweaking the pie chart. We're ready to kind of add kind of the slick style to it. So let's go ahead and say, We're done. It's were clicking off of that and now we'll have a lot of those options are now in grade. And so now we can kind of ungroomed this a little bit. We're gonna goto object on group, and it's going to say this election contained the graph after the draft. His own group, that's it. You can't access the graph anymore. So we just turning this into regular shape elements. We lose the graph portion. That's okay, cause we feel final about that going Click on Yes. So now I have the option to take the direct selection tool and just kind of selecting each pie slice. And using my arrow keys is kind of shifting, shifting it around a little bit to isolate these pie slices from each other. Just so the smaller pipe chai, uh, high slices can be seen a little better. So kind of what we did up there kind of putting our smaller slices a little bit higher up and gradually higher ups. It kind of looks like they're slowly coming out. And of course, these colors definitely have to be changed. And now that we've ungroomed all this, we have total control over these elements. Let's go ahead and right click. We're gonna have to UN group again. And now, Soup. We have one group got on group A couple times to kind of finally isolate thes, but I should eventually. So now it can safely kind of tilt these a little bit and just kind of find the right angle for each one of these, creating something a little bit more special than your standard pie chart. So let's add a little pop of color. Here have lots of different color options I can add appear to kind of match this bright jewel tone color theme we have so far here. So I'm just gonna kind of borrow the ones that have already kind of selected here. And I'm just gonna do a slower Grady in here. Click on Phil into a nice transition with some of these. Yes, we have blue, purple, and I'm not doing colors that are so far off from each other. They're kind of in a similar jewel tone theme and color palette and usually starting with kind of going in order. So I kind of have kind of purple to blue to green toe orange kind and then down to read the the darker orange is the smallest and kind of works its way around. So now that I have a nice thematic color palette applied to this, it needs kind of a little shimmer shine. We could do some kind of three D effects to it just to kind of make it pop a little bit. So I'm gonna go and select everything. Now it's no longer connected to the pie chart tool. It's its own element or a combination of different symbols and elements. I was gonna right click and worst get a group everything together. So we're getting ready to use the three d tool. So when we did use the three D toy when a group things together so it all are. They all are treated as one element. So it's good and go up to effect. We're gonna go down to three d. You ever have an experience with using three D eight and Adobe Illustrator? This is exactly what we're doing. We're gonna be doing extruding and of the extrude and bevel. Let's go ahead and click on that. We also want to check on previous who could see what the heck is happening? We're, ah kind of messing with this, So you're kind of a visual representation of the angle that it's gonna be doing. And we want to keep the front nice and center. We just want to apply a very small, subtle three d effect to it. We don't wanna have it spend this way and you can't properly see the pie slices in their order. So we're just gonna do a little bit of a change and one of the biggest things I change. I don't change. I don't mess with that. Ah, lot of settings in the three D. But one I do, uh, mess with a lot is the extrude depth which will be held deep. It is. So if I do 200 points and press enter, it's gonna be this incredibly thick, um, chart where I could go back up. And if if you're once you close out of that and you want to go back and edit, just always go to your properties panel and you'll be able to go back and click on any properties you applied to your subjects. So if you applied a three D, you can go back and click on this and get back to your settings. Let's click on preview again. And let's do I like to do a nice, skinny, extreme depth because we don't want it to look fake her cheesy who? Let's just do like a 10 points and see how that looks. We could test it out just a little bit. Maybe kind of shift this upward to get whatever angle that you like or you think would look really good. And there's also perspective. This is perspective right here. So let's see. I don't think you could see a big change with the circle in perspective. I don't think you can, but I love using perspective because almost gives you a kind of that unique camera lens almost lip seculars. There's a person like a like a fish. I type lens on. It kind of gives it a really neat look, but in this case with the pie graph, I don't think it's necessarily going to show up too much 8. Complex Pie Chart - Adding Color and Detail: when it comes to labelling, don't be afraid to use vertical, Um, or instead of going horizontal, you go a little bit vertical with your type. Because in this case, if I try to label the small little 2% 1 it doesn't always work out in the same size, and you have to make it really small. Doesn't quite work. So my solution was to kind of go outside of the graph for the smaller numbers and kind of go a little bit vertical. And it kind of helps the I kind of connect this pie slice with that particular percentage number, even though it's not actually resting on the pie slice. And another thing I think that helps is you see how these air kind of right next to each other, and they kind of conflict with each other. So when I'm trying to break down this information, they kind of they're just competing way too much. So another thing you can do is to shift this to the upper left and maybe ship this down a little bit, and so that kind of helps the I. A sign that 38% to the purple of the 48% to the blue. There's a really small changes, and but But they do add up to help people digest the information a little bit better. So just little tweaks there we can do. And so now it can add a little labels on the same held that a calm, maybe kind of similar to this up here kind of are finished version, kind of just adding it. We could stack it. So instead of having this go all the way out, I could put this food and agriculture on two lines. Um, and that can kind of help. Since I have a little bit of a room there, sitting kind of be creative and how you do all your labels, I think the label here somehow got erased, but you could see how I'm also assigning the same color to the label that the pie slice is just another way of connecting everything together. So the people who view this don't have to think very hard. He never want the viewer to have to think it should just they should just get it that connect everything where it needs to be connected and but of being. But a boom and finally have my little title here. I didn't mind over landed over the pie slice. I think that looks fine. How it iss just using Helvetica bold here. So, um, I can kind of make that title very readable. I made the total slightly bigger than the the other information here so that people can know that this is ah, what the total amount ISS. And it could even put down here. You know, 2015 or whatever year it waas that the data was captured, whatever detailed information you have to add. So let me go ahead and do that to this little pie chart and see kind of how it looks kind of the one we did for the class and I'll be right back. So here's the version in the class that we did together kind of made some adjustments compared to the sample when I did before filming this class and just kind of making those a little bit more bold. There's a couple things we could do, added a drop shattered to this overlay text. We can add a drop shattered to the to the pie slices themselves. So I'm just going to a drop shadow effect there and maybe do a nice blurring effects of nice, distant big blur. Kind of see how that looks and maybe do a 44% just adding a little bit more depth there. And another thing we could do is right now we're reading the text upside down, which is obviously a little bit harder to do. So let's make it easy on the viewer. Let's just do something really easy, select everything, but are too little numbers there. I'm just gonna rotate the pike is it doesn't matter how the pie looks because it's goes long as the pie slices are in the right divisions, it's gonna look great. We're gonna go ahead and make sure that's 38% and that's 40%. That just makes it a lot easier for them to read it. And I'm just gonna go ahead and adjust. If you these numbers and get it right and then we'll be done. Here's our final little pie chart. We can go ahead and duplicate this and make a cleaner version. If we want to be able to have one without the three D, we can kind of present both of them and see which one looks better. So I'm just gonna go ahead and select our object here. I'm going to right click. I'm going toe on group. It's gonna go ahead and get rid of the three d effect that we applied that we can kind of just these really quickly and see which version like better. We like the flat, more clean design. If we like a little bit of the three d you know, three D is optional. Dis adds a little something. But the three D tools in Adobe Illustrator are not super super advanced compared to other programs. So it doesn't have kind of that shine or glossy would get with other types of three D rendering renderings you would see in maybe Adobe Dimensions or another three D program. But maybe one day there will be better three D options. An adobe illustrator. There we go. There's a little pie chart brighter. It's accurate. So everything is divided perfectly, and I think it's dynamic enough where we could definitely see the information in a very, uh, easier, easily digestible way. So now we've done a pie chart. We have another a little bit more difficult chart to tackle. It's gonna be a line graph our bar graph we're gonna be doing working with this next complex set of information. You can open this in your word document. We're going to the annual average household income according to generations, and it's gonna have a lot of different very lines going across the grafts. We're gonna create a line graph, but we're going to try to make it visually exciting by using our colors and kind of making it also easy to read as well. So we're gonna do that next. And then we have just one or two more and then we'll be done with our graphic. And we would have gone through quite a bit of different infographic situations. I'm not super duper complex infographics, but this is just enough to kind of get you started and getting you really thinking about how to tackle visually displaying some of these ah otherwise boring fax. So I wanted to show you one little extra tip when we're doing the pie graph chart, so have our pie graph tool selected in Adobe Illustrator. It's gonna draw kind of really quick pie graph instead of going across. I'm actually gonna go down into the columns, so I'm gonna break this down by a couple. Different. That's 50%. Let's just make sure I have everything correct. Let's do 25 to 100%. So just kind of doing some random numbers that all do 100%. And since we're doing it down by the column and then go Pierre and transpose it, if he ever want to get it back to a regular pie chart with pie slices, go and switch it back. And now it's down in the column. Gonna go and click on OK, and so you'll notice it broke it down into different high slices. What's great about this is each one of these circles. Let me see if I can't close this down and go ahead and isolate this. Let's go on Group kind of unlock that kind of on group these and get these is different colors, So I kind of really show you what's going on here. There we go finally and then group it quite a bit. But the great thing is, all of these are scaled perfectly, so each one of these circles represent the exact ratio according to 100%. So just like the pie slices, this is accurate. And what's great about this is you can do a Venn diagram creative in diagram out of this Once I go ahead and get some color set up love and diagrams because I think it's a really interesting way to kind of show scale relative to each other. So going to zoom in and make these a little bit bigger as long as I scaled them all at the same time, the scales between each other stay the same. So this was our biggest one. And this is her smaller one. I love overlapping these kind of like this. And then I love going to blending modes. I get a select all of them. I'm gonna bring out my transparency window, and this is where blending modes are. And I'm gonna go down to the overlay blending mode and you notice how it overlays. And this works really well on a lighter backgrounds. It's gonna couldn't bring this over, so you can kind of see how they can kind of overlap with each other and you can kind of have things overlap her to do something similar in another stat. But this is called a Venn diagram. We could bring that bigger one up front, and then you could put the percentages in here so I can go ahead on group this and it's kind of bring in. Now the stats. I know these are 100%. It's just a an interesting way to display. Instead of doing a pie chart you could display in this been diagram format, which could be kind of a little bit more interesting. These aren't the exact fax, but and I kind of show you an example. Something I did for something I did for client very similar to this. Just a different way to kind of show, you know, breakdown of percentages. So I want to share that with you. Just kind of a different way. Uh, kind of knowing. How do I create circles all relative to each other that all break down to 100% just like a pie chart? How do I do that? That was just going down the columns instead of going across and roses how you did that using the pie chart in Adobe Illustrator 9. Line Graph Project: Welcome back. We're ready to tackle or most complicated graph. Yet we're gonna do a line graph. Sounds simple enough. But here is our data set right here. It's the average annual household income according to generations. So you have time going by. But she also have different generations having a different amount of money and some generations I don't have any data sets earlier because they weren't even born yet. So this will kind of show kind of overlapping generations of what different generations made at different times in their life span. And so we don't have a line chart that's gonna span all the way across for all of them. So you say we have missing some data sets here. So just like the pie chart with Adobe Illustrator, if you don't see it on the toolbar, just go down here to edit toolbar and go ahead and drag that end. It's gonna look just like this is gonna be the line graph tools to go ahead and select that what you could do all you have to do is just like the pie chart. Click and drag and it's gonna go ahead and pop up with this little dialogue menu where you can input your data. So what we're needing to do is we're needing get a realistic, different line graph that goes across the different numbers. So right near here, I have him labeled. So have our silent generation, which is the first kind of generation we're doing. We have generation X generation. Why in generation Z, So I'm putting in all of their data sets. As you know, there's some data sets missing because Jin Z wasn't even born. Um, and that first data set. So I just want you to kind of study this a little bit. How I set this up, go ahead and put in those numbers and give it a try to kind of experiment. How to get the line graph. Correct. It actually took quite a while to figure out what columns to use and how to kind of break this down. So just kind of take a moment pause kind of study, how I set up the columns in this You click on the check box when you're ready and you're gonna get a chart that looks a lot like this. So we have our different charts and we have our labels. If you go back to here, you could see how have the labels on the top of each column. And that's gonna show up in your key right over here. So its good go ahead and create all this for you. So there's a few things we can do. We can go ahead and go up to object on group it and start to kind of put our own visual spin to it, make it more exciting and visually compelling. Or we could even keep the line graph, edit herbal and and add some different items to it are at a visual appeal to it without having to run, group it and break the graph. We're gonna show you how to do that, but in the end, we're gonna break the graph, and I'm gonna add a whole lot more than I could do if I kept the graph intact or creditable . So I'm gonna go ahead and what you could do is grab the direct selection tool and you can directly select any of these objects and change it just like you would a regular object. Just try not to un group it good object known group. Once you do that, it's no longer connected or creditable. So let's take this really long. One. Let's let's make it. Let's make it nice. I'm just directly selecting all these little elements, and I could go down here to my stroke panel. I can increase the thickness. I can add a nice round cap to it, which it already is, could make it a different color. Make it red if I wanted to. And so on and so on. And what's great about doing it this way without on grouping it and just using the direct selection tool is I still haven't edit herbal in my graph, so I could go ahead and change this data set toe 22,000 and it's going to update it. And it's gonna keep the look and feel of it as well. So you can keep going with that and keep it intact, just in case you're not comfortable with the numbers and the client wants to add a data set , you know, have to go back and try to figure that out manually. That could be very helpful. So what I'm gonna do is I'm really happy with kind of the basic set up of these lines, and we're going to do something a little creative with it. So I'm gonna go ahead and ungroomed this and no longer make it inevitable. We're gonna go upto object. I'm gonna go and select our graph. First, let's go ahead and close this go to object UN group and I'm going to say yes, that's fine. And so now I have him just as individual objects. And now we can really play around graphically with how this looks. So being able to use the line chart kind of tool in Adobe Illustrator saved us a lot of time from having to figure out all the data points and doing manually. So now that we have this, let's go ahead and drag it down and let's put it in our dark background and start making some design decisions, and it could take up quite a bit of room, as we already kind of planned in the beginning that we're gonna have a lot of room for this particular infographic. I went ahead and I added labels. Let me see if I can't get this to be white, so I can kind of see show you. I just added simple labels, one for each data set As we know the time goes forward. Just look at your original data set and figure out how you need to label that it's on was making all the black things white so we can have some high contrast and kind of see what we have going on here and also could have to right click and on group to have access to some of these elements. Okay, great. So now that we have kind of our basic charts set up, we can mess out, mess around with typography a little bit. Let's on group this. Let's make this a thinner. Wait. Maybe a little bit smaller. Make it a nice lightweight. It's kind of making a little more slick than we can make the years a little bit bigger. Bolder. So we have bold here. Do we have bold oblique? What does this do? Regular bold. That's where it really gets to be fun. As a designer, kind of past the data set, we got the data set perfect and according to how it should be. So now we can add a slick polish to it, so I'm just gonna un group all these elements and see what we could do with these line charts. What's at kind of a cool, um, nice Grady into it. So let's see if we can't just sample super duper bright color for this one. Let's make it green. We might have to ungroomed bit. Gets a lot of it on grouping that comes with these charts to make sure I have this in isolation. It's on Group one more time. There we go. So now we can go ahead and sample Green. Flip that two stroke. Make sure I have my nice round cap on, but I just think that looks more polished. Okay, that's a data set right here. Kind of like how it's all connected or how it's instead of one big, long radiant. It's kind of segmented like that kind of looks really interesting. We can also do something with these squares here. We could make those wider weaken at her own, and I think we should add her own Let's do the Ellipse tool and we're just gonna grab the Grady int that we used. We're gonna flip it to fill, add a little bit of a drop shadow to this and kind of put it on top of her data point. Maybe we can make that, uh, change the radiant, just a tiny bit. Get a little softer. There's like that. Maybe we could mess with the drop shadow a little bit more, and I can always just go to my properties panel. If I can't find my properties panel, I can always just pop it up. Bring it up Double quick out drop shadow. Let's preview this. We'll see if we can't make it stronger, nice and strong. Maybe the blurs a little bit too much. That's 2.5 There we go. Nice. Couldn't really kind of see that. And we can even add another circle. So I'm just gonna hold down, option and drag and make a smaller circle here. Maybe we could make this like a great radiant. I can always just go to edit edit colors and I'm just going to go down to convert to grayscale. This is just a quick way to change a color. Anything from color. It's a colored radiant to a grayscale radiant, and it saves us a little time Step having to go in the grading panel and making adjustments there. That's when a little Papa Gray. So now I do have to go into my grade. Ian Pannell, my radiant panel. It's like push some of these back, maybe drop that darker color on that a lightning quite a bit. Maybe make this pure white. So now we have a white to a gray. Let's do a drop shadow on this since it remembered or drop shadow settings up here in the effects, we just have to recall it appears to effect drop shadow. I'm just in my drop shadow panel and 1/2 kind of these settings set up a little bit of blur , a little bit of distance and a pretty strong radiant. You can kind of see it kind of looks like it cast a little bit of a shadow. Um, I'm just doing small edits now is making it even brighter. Here we go has a nice kind of metallic look to it. We can zoom out and see if we kind of like how that data set looks. We can always make this. We have an outline this path on this so it could always make that a little bit skinnier, and that will bring out the strength of that a little bit. So now that we like that, let's go and group that little element together. And we could just hold down option and kind of drag it manually over these points. And it's so much easier to do this than to keep the graph live. But once you have the data sets, if you don't think the data sets are gonna change, it's always I just find it easier, more creative toe. Unlock that graph and to start to do things manually. At that point, let's find a different color for this one. Of course, we're going to change our labels or key on the right. So let's do this. A nice contrast from Green. Let's do a bright purple or maybe this kind of orange color and we can adopt the same stroke. So let's find out what stroke we have here. Ah, we have a three point stroke, so let's do a three point stroke here, do around the cap and we don't need these little points anymore, and we could delete those and we can go ahead and make our adjustments and see what it looks like using these colors. So now let's do a nice purple little contrast, great from the green and orange. I'm just adopting some of the same colors we've been using throughout the class, and you can access thes same Grady INTs in the downloadable sheet that'll have provided in the resource is that makes just doing the same settings there and just getting rid of some of these points and just doing the same thing. Just get a copy and paste this one down here and then make that purple and for the last Data said, I'll make that purple in a little bit. You have this one little data set. We only have one for the Generation Z because they haven't been alive for very long, so they just have one data point. We don't want to forget that little guy right there, so it's got a copy and Paste will have to make that its own color doesn't really have a connecting line because it doesn't have a second data set. So let me adjust some of these colors, and they were going to start looking at the graph is a hole to see if there's any way we can streamline it a little bit and save some room 10. Line Graphic Project - Adding A Pop of Color: So I went ahead and updated kind of the colors here. I think in the stroke to four points instead of five. Just kind of make it very fixing. When you zoom out, you can really make out the lines really well. Also up today updated our key right here. And I'm gonna go ahead and move our key over here cause it's all about saving room. This takes up a lot of horizontal space. So if I go ahead and move my key over here, it's really gonna help. And I might need to do summon grouping here. There we go. So now we're gonna move it over here, and now it's more concise. And what's great about this is the key is really close to the lines, so you don't have to look very hard to understand what line is which. That makes it easier for the viewer to see it. I could even think in these up even more dramatically just as long as I could make it easy . Course. As you know, I'm gonna change these instead of white. I'm gonna make these the corresponding colors toe once again help the user and the viewer be able to digest this information and a sign these and look at them a lot easier. So I finished up correlating the color with the key. And one thing we want to do is we have the all these nice kind of want really want the users I to be drawn to this kind of more colorful part of the portion. This is really important information, but it's not as critical. It is critical to look at, but let's just maybe not. There's so much attention because it's a bright white drawn to the numbers. We really want people's I to be drawn here, and then they can refer back to the numbers to get an idea of what it's talking about. So all that to say, Let's kind of make it a little bit of a medium gray, so it kind of blends into the background. We still wanted to be eligible. Lets this kind of see what maybe just a little bit of a darker light gray looks like and notice how this really starts to pop out over here. I also made sure this was in dollar amounts and we could probably afford to make this a tiny, bit smaller once again to kind of draw the users I here and not be so heavy on the left. It's all about balance, and you don't want to have something be too heavy or too bright on the far side of the design. You really want to have that one main focal point and not have too many things drawing your eye at the same time so we can continue to make these bold. I like having these bold and these light because there's contrast between those. So I don't kind of mix these two columns up when I look at it right away. Um, there's kind of some differentiation with the type, so I'm pretty happy with that. So here we are, I think, in what about 15 minutes really kind of create kind of a somewhat attractive line graph. We could probably continue to work on this more, but all this was created just by using illustrators line graph to help get you started with data points and then make sure the line graphs were accurate in the world ableto un group that really kind of add a polish and shine using our bright radiance in keeping with the theme of some of the infographics we've been doing in the beginning of the class. So one thing we can do, there's an option here called the area graph tool. And you kind of see that little icon how he can actually do draw, uh, kind of ah, solid box underneath the line graph to really kind of around the data. So instead of having it be floating and then you have to have your I look down to the data , it really helps to ground the data and help your I connect it to the bottom now kind of show it a little harder to explain. But I'm gonna take the pin tool and I'm gonna just trace this. It's tracing the line. They're going to draw it all the way down to the bottom of the state of set doesn't have to be perfect, because we can always change it using the direct selection tool later and tweak it. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to send us all the way to the back. I could even just right click and just send it to the back or do my little keyboard shortcut and I'm gonna do the eyedropper tool. Sample that radiant, make sure it's a fill and kind of adjust it. So maybe it goes from light to dark, and so it kind of helps to ground the data. I do see a problem with just having one data set. There's nothing to really ground that data. So it's gonna be kind of a floating point. That might be the only issue with this particular method. But I think it works really great visually instead of it kind of really helps fill out the graph a little bit instead of having large open gaps. So if you have a data set that works really well with this method at say, go for it when you do kind of bright on the top, little bit darker on the bottom and what I'm gonna do is going right. Click and send us all the way to the back. Resume a keyboard shortcut. You do command right bracket to pop it one more layer in front and you do the same thing for the purple. And it could cut a see how this really looks great. Um, I think our data set might have an issue because our line graph we only have one point on that one line graph for that generation. So let's and that it will have to send that too far in the back. You could see how that looks neat. So the only issue is, what do we do here? Do we do a line here to kind of represent the blue? We don't know there's health that looks that probably might take away the Grady int on here . I could even make that white now, because now we have a lot of radiance going on. We can even add a drop shadow to some of these strokes back, so only add a drop shattered kind of adds a little bit of layers to it. We could do the same thing with ease. The solid Grady in boxes. We could apply the same drop shadow, and then it kind of has that layered look. But for this particular graph, I don't think it will work quite as well. But I'm just show you just kind of some options that you can do to kind of spice up your line charts and line graphs a little bit. So there you have it. Hopefully you enjoyed this class. We got to do all of these exciting infographics. Ah, as extra lessons hopefully add and added to the class either now or later we never have a chance to start putting all these little graphics together to make a more concise maybe have a theme and do our little title in the middle, just like when we were blocking out in the beginning. Um, I just wanted to kind of end it now to be a good steward of your time and not go on too long. But look for those extra lessons, maybe they're already added. I'll go ahead and send out an email whenever those air ready. Um, you could be able to see how I make all this until one theme and try to make it all work. 11. Student Project: it is now time for a student project. Make sure to download the resource guide in Resource is you could find those in the project section or file sections class. They contain all the stats with you so you can create your own spin on these facts to make them visually compelling. You could do the ones we worked on throughout the class, or you can find your own facts and figures and created custom. And from that, it could be a line chart. A bar graph pie graph of men, diagrams, whatever you need to use the best, display the data and a logical but creative way, and I look forward to seeing your projects.