Bee Aware

I designed this longform infographic to practice designing a map-based visual story outlined in Roth (2020) that leverages a variety of tropes to enhance the storytelling experience. This was my first 'storymap' I ever created besides just a standalone static visual story.

I chose a simple color palette colors to establish a uniform mood throughout the story. The colors were chosen to embody what most readers think of bees and to excite the reader with more vibrant, saturated hues. Following my skeuomorphism graphic representations, I used two futuristic sans-serif typefaces to fit the theme. I drove linearity of the narrative by having the path of the bee character follow the reader through the infographic as the user scrolls. To help the reader digest the large amount of information depicted in the story, I integrated dosing in a multitude of ways from offsetting text chunks, alternative between graphics and text, adding balanced white space, and sequencing with the bee trail moving around. I also designed the story to be more memorable by using redundancy to repeat important or unusual information. Notably, I employed visual accenting on key terms/points through a change in type size and or hue. To make the story more intuitive, I created a metaphor to help readers grapple with the large sum of 20 billion dollars by using a comparison in size. Throughout the plot, voice was added using quotes to show that the bee is talking to cultivate empathy in readers.

Created using Illustrator and Indiemapper