My project for course: Information Design: Storytelling with Data in Illustrator

For the final project, I investigated the subject of clean water accessibility across countries and regions – revealing the gap between wealthy countries and the rest of the world.

The final infographic was designed to fit a double page of an infographic book aimed to inform and shed light on an important issue: one in four people do not have access to safe drinking water.

The first step was to define an investigative question, the brief and look for data from which to draw some answers. Once a reputable data source was found, I downloaded and analysed the data.

Before designing the visualisation, I put together some moodboards and explored a number of ideas on paper. Here are some snapshots of the ideation process.

Once I identified the best approach on paper, I encoded the data with Data Illustrator and I created a prototype to validate the chosen direction.

Then I imported the prototype into Adobe Illustrator. I created two dendrograms for the visualisation of country level data and two area charts to illustrate the overall trend across the last two decades for the two clusters – wealthy countries versus the rest of the world. I also added some illustrative elements (the taps and the glasses) and I refined the layout by adding all necessary annotations for effective reading and decoding of the data – including the key.

Finally I exported the infographic for different channels envisioning alternative formats – such as social media assets and an interactive digital experience to explore the data.