Assignment 3 Commentary

I decided to work on an infographic about the bubble tea industry in Singapore because I realised that a lot of articles you find online are about the more lifestyle aspect of it, such as new stores coming to Singapore and new flavours. I search for reports about the industry and decided to focus on the history of bubble tea in Singapore, the customisable parts of bubble tea, a few statistics and the top brands in Singapore.

I wanted to keep the layout clean and organised and placed my information in a very linear, top-down layout. During the first critique, I was told to play around with different elements and to make the information more streamlined, in the sense that I talked about Singapore specifically or the global scale.

However, having a horizontal timeline made the text very cramps and hard to read. Thus, I rearranged it to a vertical timeline. I removed some of the information I initially planned to use due to the lack of space and instead chose to focus on the timeline, the tea bases and toppings and the three statistics. I enclosed the information in a bubble tea cup so that people will more or less know what the infographic is about at first glance. For the background, I segregated the different information by using a different shade of brown for each block of information, also making it look like brown sugar fresh milk drink. I illustrated the different cups, teas and toppings as visual guides to the infographic.

During the second critique, I was told to play around with the environment and allow the toppings to look as if they were floating instead of in an order. For the timeline, I was told that I should streamline the content even more, to use bullet points and to use a horizontal timeline, staggering the information at the top and bottom. This would give me space to make the title bigger and use the treatment for the tea bases for the title instead. This would allow the title to be attention-grabbing. For the background, I was told to smoothening the waves. Lastly, I was told to change the sequence of the numbers at the bottom from 3, 2, 1 to 1, 2, 3.

Thus for the final infographic, I followed most of the suggestions made. However, one that I didn't follow was the one to make the toppings look as though they are floating. This is because I felt that after increasing the size of the title, there was too little space to do so. Thus, I feel that having the topping arranged in a straight line is fine. Instead, I made the timeline a wavy line to give the impression that the pearls are floating.