Infographics

 

Balance was one of the more difficult principles to convey in this assignment.  This was a lot of information in the form of boundaries, charts, and graphics that did not fit easily together.  I constantly was having to resize the charts made in Excel to get them to match one another, one huge drawback of not being able to make all of my charts in ArcGIS Pro.  For legibility, I used a 11”x17” landscape layout to avoid font sizes going below 5pt.  I used a background color for the layout to try and hide the fact that this is several elements all spaced apart from one another.  With the background color not being white, the idea was to have the map reader “flow” from one chart to the next without acknowledging the empty space between them.  For better contrast, I included slightly-transparent backgrounds to these elements against a colored layout. 

I chose two stacked area charts to represent the average inactivity and smoking rates from 2012-2018.  I didn’t want to include another bar graph considering I used two for the top three/bottom three states in these categories, and I thought a stacked area chart would provide better visibility than a line graph.  I chose not to include data labels as I’m only trying to show a general trend (or lack thereof) over the recent years in each category.  I again used slightly transparent colors for the backgrounds of these images to draw attention to the chart area without washing out the stacked area.

I also included a small fact about West Virginia in the general area of the smoking information on this infographic.  I extracted only the boundary of West Virginia from the states shapefile and boxed it into a rectangular neat line to distinguish this fact from the rest of the adjacent information.  Its source was also included in the neat line to again distinguish it from the listed source for the rest of the infographic.

With the Excel file, I used the AVERAGEIF function in new columns to sort out the average smoking and inactivity rates of the states quickly.  Once these were calculated, I sorted these lists from largest to smallest and deleted all rows except the first and last three.  I saved two separate files, one for the smoking averages and one for the inactivity averages.  I used Time New Roman for all font (just like the scatterplot) but had reduce the font size of the axis labels to 5-pt to line up next to the bars properly.  I used data labels but did not find a way to reduce the sigfigs to two digits.  I removed the grid lines as they became overwhelming even with a small line weight, and for contrast, used a similar color for each chart relative to their associated choropleth maps and increased the transparency of the backgrounds to 80%.