BEHIND THE INFOGRAPHIC

The Dublin Airport infographic started as a concept to help me expand my graphic design skills. Inspired by my recent trip to the United Kingdom and fascinated by the airports architecture, I wanted to learn more. Making this infographic was the perfect way to achieve both goals.

The research phase was surprisingly difficult. Considering Dublin Airport’s size and popularity, there was surprisingly little information that could be found with a cursory look. Following the chain of management and figuring out the governing bodies of DUB were key, and once they were found a vast amount of information was available to me. The primary frustration of this was how many pages each document had. Since the information I had was in the form of long-winded performance and regulation reports, there were hundreds of pages of data and observations I had to sift through to find answers to my main 3 questions; what is it like internally? How busy is it? And what should I expect if I travel there? These questions were answered by 3 categories - physical characteristics (food, restrooms, floor plan, parking, runways, etc.), travel (destinations, flight times), and traffic (people per year, flights per year, immigration details). The data was compiled and a preliminary wireframe was made.

With data selected, I was able to begin on visual details. I didn’t want to use premade icons - part of the exercise was expanding my graphic skills, including illustration. I did, however use references to help capture more difficult shapes and to hone my digital illustration skills. I was working on an iPad mini 2 and using Adobe Draw (now defunct). It was about this time I decided that if I wanted to continue doing graphics such as these, I would need to upgrade my hardware in the near future. Now, initial icons were made by hand, but I had to move them into Illustrator where I discovered that Draw made every line a shape! Not helpful! Cleaning up the icons ended up being the most time consuming part of the project. Thankfully, The project moved pretty fast once all the icons had been cleaned up and completed.

Everything was compiled into illustrator where I made my initial layouts. Working off of the idea I had sketched earlier, I mocked up an identical infographic.

I didn’t like it.

That made things a bit tricky. I was frustrated that the icons weren’t the exact same sizes - some were tall and skinny, others short and fat (learning experience right there) - and lining up the text was proving tricky as well. Steadily getting more and more frustrated, I mocked up 2 other layouts, red lined the one that people responded to the best, and started cleaning up the layout and moved the project into inDesign. I printed a few copies, adjusted the color profile and a few grid lines, and I was happy. Finally. This project started as a quick exercise. I only wanted to spend a month at most, but the more I worked on it, the more I realized that this had become more than just a quicky exercise. It was a full on project to me. In the end it spanned from early December 2019 to February 2nd, 2020; almost double the time I wanted to spend on it.

That said, I’m glad I spent the extra time on it. I made a piece I love, expanded my skill set, and learned so, so much along the way.