government shutdown infographic

In my Design Process: Context and Systems class, we created infographics with data found in news articles. I decided to research the then-current government shutdown, which was relevant to me since my dad worked in the federal government.

Making this infographic also helped me learn about the details of the government shutdown, such as the financial debate that caused it as well as the people it affected.

This was composed in Photoshop and used digital spreadsheets.

Design Choices

Colors

“What better two colors to use than red and blue?” I thought to myself in the early stages of this project. I chose softer hues of the patriotically familiar colors, nearly pastels, to make the infographic easier on the eyes; the colors were supposed to be educational rather than political.

Bar graph

Photoshop’s ability to freely transform shapes came to be too free for what I was planning to use for the bar graphs of the four longest shutdowns and who the shutdown affected. To maintain statistical accuracy, I opted to create the bar graphs in Numbers, the macOS equivalent of Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, and import the spreadsheets into the infographic as images. I then chose to invert the orientation of the bar graph in the “Who?” section to create visual excitement as it contrasted with the bar graph in the “When?” section.