Virtual Visual Foodstory
This project was part of a self-selected semester entirely devoted to data visualization, I immersed myself in a self-selected dish. A onepager of this had to be made with information about the dish. This could be about the history or something else. As long as it would be informative for the readers. All the topics would be put in a good visualization that tells a story, takes the noise out of the data and shows the useful information. One condition was that all illustrations and animations had to be self-made.
Starting out
I began by orienting myself to topics that would fit the chosen dish. Out of this I came up with a number of focuses such as how healthy is eating sushi / is sushi healthy, where does sushi originally come from, how do you eat sushi (etiquette) and what types of sushi exist?. I combined all my ideas in a mindmap to get a beter grip on what I actually wanted to show on the onepager itself. I did some research by reading through books like " " by .., searching on the internet and letting some restaurants fill in a enquete.
The approaches I eventually chose are traditional sushi versus evolved sushi, How to eat sushi the right (traditional) way? and Japanese dining in sushi bars. You can see part of my research in the images below.
Different Styles
For the style, I first started looking for images of sushi to create a good image. Then I looked up different drawing styles and made a sketch, from this I made my choice based on the target audience. Since sushi lovers do not fall into a specific age category I wanted to make it as universal and entertaining as possible. The style is simple, easy and appealing to a large group of different people and also a reason why I had more freedom to make my own choice on the style without a lot of specific matching reasons for the audience.
Planning & iterating
Once I knew for sure what subjects I wanted to work on and had the right information together, I started looking at how I could best visualize each infographic. You see, you have different types of infographics and of course the information itself largely determines what ways you can display it. As you can see in the images below, it is okay to deviate from your plan, for example, I would first make an infographic about how to make sushi but this would be less relevant to the target audience and readers because they might have the basic information about sushi.
Result
If you see the onepager, click the button below!
Sushi