The Finished Product!

I just got back from our post-thanksgiving meeting, where we finished our fabulous infographic! We took a lot of the critical feedback from the class into account while we were making our edits.

This is the draft we showed the class

Here's our final product!

We converted the file from the piktochart file to illustrator. Natasha, our resident illustrator wizard, redrew all the shapes to our needs. She also added some cool new characters by tracing and editing stock photos. We thought that our first draft had a lot of white space, so we used a light gray background that matched our color scheme. I honestly think that the gray helps make the graphic look so much more professional and make all the icons pop. We also all agreed that the color scheme was a bit masculine, so we used a more feminine font. We made all of the font on the signs a LOT bigger, which proved a little tricky in illustrator. 

We thought that "serve" would be a much more professional way to say "save lives". We also streamlined the information by adding a lot of it towards the bottom of the infographic under the corresponding icons, and we were very particular about the information we kept on the graphic, and the information we took off. We worked really well together finalizing the graphic and combing through our artists' statement, and had a lot of really productive discussions about word choice and word placement, which I thought was really fun and engaging.

Here is our artists' statement:

“The Road to WPI EMS” targets WPI students who want to join WPI’s EMS. WPI’s EMS is a club that is known campus wide for being first responders to medical emergencies. However, there is very little information readily known about the organization. Our infographic serves to explain the process to become a general member of WPI EMS. The visual we are most proud of is a word cloud in the shape of an ambulance driving along a road. We made the word cloud using the most frequent vocabulary words from the WPI EMS website. This visual serves to direct the viewer along a path that sequentially iterates the steps a student must take to become a part of WPI EMS. We included road signs to display these steps and to bring the viewer’s eye down the winding road. The final sign has the recognizable shape and color of a stop sign with the WPI EMS logo inside it. The sign indicates the end of the process to become a general member. Behind this stop sign is a cartoon human jumping for joy. They hold an EMS badge in their hand to show their excitement in achieving membership. We used visual cues at the bottom of the infographic to summarize the application process and to provide more information about it. There is a figure performing CPR because knowing CPR is one of the qualifications needed to apply to WPI EMS. The WPI EMS symbol on this figure has the WPI crest inside it, a recognizable logo which creates ethos. Walkie-talkies are used because they are one of WPI EMS’s main forms of communication. Using the cartoon-like people was intentional -- they are colorless and genderless so that all WPI students can picture themselves as a member of WPI’s EMS. We chose our color scheme from WPI EMS’s colors: navy, red, grey, and white. These colors are slightly masculine, so we balanced them with a thinner, softer, more feminine font. This serves to attract both genders to the organization.

I'm really really proud of how the graphic turned out, and I am really excited to send it to WPI EMS! Who knows, maybe we will see it around campus!