United in Diversity? How Canadian women and men see the divisive political issues

My project for Gabrielle's course is an infographic about Canadian political issues, combining a bar chart variation with photos.

Background

I wanted to use survey data that would allow for juxtaposition of two groups.

I found a study by the non-profit Canadian public polling institute, the Angus Reid Institute. In their study of Core Canadian Values, they present respondents with several questions on "face-off" political issues. That is, each question only has two answers for the respondent to pick between.

Political polling visualizations rarely go beyond simple bar charts, and I felt that these results warranted a more refined approach that would still make it easy to understand.

My goals for the visualization

Here's what I was trying to achieve:

- Make it clear which issues are divisive. The closer the population's outlook on an issue is to the 50% mark, the more division there is on the issue. But the farther the view is from 50%, the more consensus there is.
- Add a liberal-conservative comparative dimension. The positions proposed in the survey questions were clearly either more liberal or conservative, but I didn't see it clearly reflected in the reporting I saw.
- Make it more interesting to read by emphasizing gender differences. Although some issues didn't have women and men disagreeing to a significant degree, some had huge differences. This dimension would allow the reader to spend more time to explore and provide a very simple, intuitive framework for a comparison.

First sketches in Excel

Since the source of the data is a non-profit, the results of their study are completely accessible, from the final report down to the original questionnaire and data tables—so you can really get your hands dirty!

After assembling the survey data into a table in Excel, re-arranging and re-labeling, I made a rough sketch for the data points:

Still in Excel, I roughly laid out the key elements for the infographic, including photos. Instead of starting the axis from zero, I tried to have the center of the axis (50%) be the focus of attention, since how close the views would be from the 50% would indicate the level of division in society on the relevant issues:

Then, I copied the chart into Illustrator, where I re-created and fine-tuned it.

Picking illustrations

I wanted to play on the stereotypical colors for men and women for the shapes that represented their data points in the chart, by complementing those with atypical-looking people.

To illustrate the differences between men and women, I found some old public domain photos from around 1920s-1930s.

In modern stock imagery, clean-cut and suit-wearing women and men dominate; women are rarely represented with heavily tattooed avatars (the "rebels" of their time, and arguably even still now), and men are rarely pictured as rough-around-the-edges farmers.

For each photo, I cut the person out of it in Photoshop.

I particularly love this detail of the shape of this farmer's hat contrasting with the bold triangular shape in the back, and how juxtaposed they look together with the lady:

The final result

In the final infographic, I complemented the old photos by using an off-black color for the type and most of the shapes and lines, and an off-white color as a background, while contrasting the photos against very bright, contemporary colors.

Thank you Gabrielle for sharing the knowledge!