Vatican City Infographic
Project Brief
Working with The Vatican State:
Design a simple map showing the location of the chosen country in the world (context) along with 3–5 graphical displays (charts, tables, diagrams) that show attributes of/information about that country.
Use typography, colour, graphic symbols or other devices as appropriate. Keep the wording, the sequence and the visual ‘treatments’ consistent throughout the set of diagrams and the map.
Use the name of the city in the title and add a descriptive subtitle that relates to the information you are providing. The visual language you use (colour palette, light that aspect as not usually one first thought of illustration style, embellishments, etc.) should give subtle cues about some aspect of the country (cultural, climatic, etc).
Approach
I found a lot of exciting information about Vatican City. After much deliberation, I decided to focus on the population and demographics. Even though the Vatican is the smallest recognized country in the world, it is a church-run state, and because of this, its population is not very diverse. I wanted to highlight that aspect as it is not usually one ‘s first thought when thinking of this country.
To emphasize this, I focused on these statistics:
population density
population demographics ( % ): female, swiss guard, religion, urban population
residency
map ( it is a country within the city of Rome & that can be complicated to visualize )
User Group
This was a small poster intended for education purposes. The demographic of the user group is upper-elementary school children ( Gr4-6). Therefore, it was essential to keep the illustrations simple and colourful yet not childish.
Learning Outcomes
This project required the visual representation of information. It seems like a relatively simple task. However, it has its challenges. I found myself naturally just creating infographics, which was not the task. Infographics are not inherently informational. They supplement other facts or information visually. Infographics do not give the user any information. Therefore, I had to constantly remind myself that every symbol or illustration I added should be doing something informative. The user should gain some knowledge through the inclusion of this.
For example: with the population density isometric chart. I originally had 924/km2 under the header of Population Density and then the chart beside. However, by including the information on people per square kilometre, what was the point of the actual chart depicting said information? There was no one. So I removed it because the chart itself told this information. Each humanoid figure represented ten people, and the square itself represented a square kilometre.