Hi everyone, Karl Gude here. Lots of people ask me how I started infographic and how I finish it and what happens in between. So I've decided to go ahead and show you that very quickly here using the topic of melanoma, a cancer of the skin. The first thing I did was decided to go dig up some data. And so I went to places like the National Cancer Institute, Centers for Disease Control, and other places to look for good relevant data that I knew was reliable. And here you can see there's a chart that says new cases and deaths. Luckily there was a spread sheet that was associated with that data that I could cut and paste into my Adobe Illustrator charting function. Here I was able to find a map, Skin Cancer Rates by State, and down below here is a map which you'll see in a second. I brought the data of cases and deaths into Illustrator and I plotted it as a line chart. So you can see the top line up there as cases and down there between zero and five are the deaths which are a portion of the total cases. I decided to look at this data another way and so I plotted it as a stacked bar chart and it's actually sideways, but it could easily have been straight up and down, too. But you can see that the cases are at the tip of the deaths are at the tip of the cases. And I thought, gee, that's a little bit harder to read on the top of a scale like that, so I decide to try one more way which was lower right, which was putting them side by side. But I decided just to stick with the line chart on the left. Another bit of data I was interested in is I wanted to compare melanoma to other kinds of cancers. I actually have a typo here, you see breast twice when the second one is supposed to be lung cancer. I was curious which cancer was the most fatal if you got it. I wanted to make them comparable. So I decided to convert these to percentages, so I went to my percentage calculator online and it gives you a percentage. Here's the map I found at the CDC which has melanoma of the skin death rates by state. The good news about using Adobe Illustrator or any vector drawing program is that there are some free vector images and maps and stuff out there, icons, all kinds of stuff. So I took this U.S. map which, it's a vector map, and the way it was drawn is I can click on individual states and fill them in with a color. So here I've brought in my vector map on the left, and I've placed a screen shot of the CDC map on the right. I decided to choose a dark gray blue as my darkest color. And then I clicked on the color guide tab in Illustrator and it breaks it down for me, and you can look at that in many different ways. And I colored in the states. You don't want to ever have more than five tints to one color, even that's stretching it. The human eye just can't really distinguish between tints when they're that close to each other. So here are my elements all plotted. Cancer rates and deaths by type of cancer in the top left, and then the percentages I calculated from those to the right and then on the lower left is my new cases and deaths as the line chart. I decided to fix those up because this is how Illustrator plots them, they just sort of plot out this ugly kind of thing. So it takes a bit of work to get them to look good like this. So I decided to look for some images. I wanted more than just the graphs and maps, I wanted some images that were going to show you what to look for on your skin. How do you know if a mole is melanoma? And I also wanted an anchor photo to show one of the ways that people get melanoma, which is sunning themselves out at the beach. I went looking for some images and I found this one from Getty Images, which is a beautiful photograph. And notice the colors in there, the bronze and the red. Once I found the melanomas, I realized, these are also bronze and red. And so I decided to change the color scheme of my charts and map to be more on the brown side. I've chosen a graphic size here which will fit on the web so that it's for viewing on the web and it'll fit most computer screens pretty well. And one of the first things I do is I draw a big box around the whole area, leaving a margin, then I split that box into a grid by going in Illustrator from Object to Path and then Split Into Grids, and you can do rows and columns there. And reasons for splitting into a grid is so that I can lock pieces together. If you have the structure, you can look really organized, if you don't have a an underlining grid structure,you're just going to be floating pieces around moving them into this and maybe it'll look good here. I don't know. Here I brought all of my elements together. I decided to black in areas of the graphic using gray boxes. You can see I even put in some dummy headlines. Headline here about moles on the lower left. Headline about charts on the right, top right, and then I've stuck the map in there. I'm just blocking off areas using these gray boxes. Up at the charts, I realized that there are six columns across there, so I could use two columns for each chart, so I blocked in some boxes and you can see those columns for the chart up there, it looks like it'll fit here. And then I decided to just go ahead and cram the charts in, not really paying attention to what happens to the type or the font at this point, it's just going to take quite a bit of manipulating that type to make sure that nothing is squished. You never want to scrunch or crush type. Use type the way it was designed. If you need to have a more condensed font, then use a condensed version of that font. Don't just squish it. So here's how they look after a bit of manipulation. You can see the blue underlying grid under it and I'm very true to that. You can see that I put some lines in between each chart. I have the headlines above each chart, aligning perfectly. I didn't want to run the headline all the way across all six columns. So I decided to make it just two thirds of the way and then stretch the other chart on the right, up put a little bit deeper if you're explanation in the text above that. And you can see at the bottom that all the labels on the lower access are all identical same with the ones on the left on the value access. On the right side you can see that there are numbers right on top of the bars. If you're going to put numbers on top of the bars, you don't need the scale at all. And this is what it looks like without the grid, it just looks very organized and very clean. This is zooming in here, you don't see the word melanoma is riding high in the box. The 13% is riding higher above the bar than the 17%. Those are the little details that kind of erode your credibility if they're not perfect. So you just drop that melanoma down in the box, bring this 13% to be the same as the 17%. So this is how the graphic looks final graphic. It's not written, it's just dummy text but you get the idea. And you can see that I actually had room for one more thing which is where the woman with the hat is. I was able to fit the two types of melanoma, benign and malignant, on the left side there under the photo. So it's nice little package there between the photo, the headline, and the woman and the melanomas. I actually had the headline here about moles above the photo and the photo drop down above the images of Mona but it was really too much text up at the top, you had that headline Skin Cancer then the sub head and then the headline under that. It was a collision of type up there so I split it apart with a photo. You want to try to achieve a balance in an image like this. You know the charts are all little and small and they don't really have anchor field to it whereas the map has a really solid object has this anchoring feeling to it. And it balances well with that big anchor photo up there. They're diagonally across with each other and the melanoma in the dead center. Well just off to the left center, there is a really good strong image that balances down below with the woman below it. I had a 12 column grid to begin with and the underlying visual structure that you finally see is about a six column grid. I also try to align things left to right also. As you can see, I try to do that here. And also don't forget about having a margin around it, don't run your type right up to the edges of the box. It'll look silly, and this gives a little bit of breathing room to the rest of the graphic. The type, you can see that I've got the sub headed, I have it just a little bit larger than the type that goes in the rest of the graphic. And when in the first thing I did was to create this unit. Just a dummy thing that has nine point and it says Bold Leadin with just some dummy type in there. And I used that and peppered it all over the graphics. It's a really good trick. Just make sure that it create a consistency. What I tried to do with headlines, sub heads like these, chapter heads, section heads whatever you want to call them, is I try to balance them too so that they're not all side by side and cramming together. Well that's it ladies and gentleman, I hope that helps you, and good luck.
