I recently completed two infographics spreads for the travel magazine, AFAR. These spreads are featured in a section of the magazine called “Curious Planet”, and cover one topic through the use of statistics, facts, and illustration. The latest is about… travel. The following is a loose account of the project and how it went from spreadsheet to finished spread in a couple of weeks.

As with the start of most projects it’s helpful to sit down with all involved and come up with a game plan for getting from point A to point B. In the early stages of this project that meant meeting with AFAR and looking over the types of data they wanted to focus on as well as brainstorming other information that might be of interest to their audience. After this initial meeting it’s time to sketch out concepts and possible visualizations of that data while looking at how it all might fit together on the spread.

I’ll usually come up with a few ideas and after some back and forth with the client these loose sketches are refined.

Sketches (even shitty one’s) save time and once I’ve got something that everyone is happy with I’ll take them into illustrator and begin creating the individual elements that will make up the final.

As I get farther along in the illustration process, copy comes in from the writter and all the illustration work starts to move over to InDesign.

A few more rounds of back and forth and we’re ready for proofs, color correcting and shipping. A very fun project with an amazing client!