Into A Small World (2021)
-- A Book About Nutrition and Dietary Fibre
GRPH-3017-004 Graphic Design 3 Project
Professors: Keith Rushton, Isabel Meirelles
The book discusses about the information of nutrition facts and focuses on dietary fibre, and provides healthy recipes according to the analysis of nutrition and food. The goal of the book is to provide a general idea of nutrients and a comprehensive understanding of dietary fibre to audiences. By learning how to read and use the nutrition facts label, people can customize their diet plan in a more scientific and efficient way.
Inspiration
This is a big project for the graphic design major class. The requirement of the project was to determine the topic independently to complete the editorial design of a book of data visualization. When I think about data, I associate it with data that is all over everyday life but is ignored by many people. In other words, micro data in the macro world.
Food is an essential thing in our lives, thus associating it with the trace elements that exist in food and in the human body. Including myself, I don't pay much attention to the nutrition table on the package when I buy food, and I don't have an idea about some elements and ratios in the nutrition table, such as dietary fibre. Therefore, I decided to use the nutrition table and dietary fibre as the topic of this project.
Nutrient facts in our daily life
Vegetables in our daily life
Ideation
The story of data visualization of nutrition will be developed in three parts. In the first chapter, I provide a detailed introduction to the components of nutrition tables, how to use them, and dietary fiber. Chapter 2 then applies this knowledge to everyday foods, teaching readers to analyze the nutrition of everyday foods. With the information in Chapters 1 and 2, readers will learn to mix and match foods on their own and create a healthy recipe for themselves in Chapter 3.
The final chapter of the story expands into topics beyond diet such as exercise styles, thinking styles and lifestyles, with the goal of inspiring readers to discover microscopic data in the macro world and to think about their connection to themselves and how they affect and help their bodies and lives.
Insoluble fibre illustration
Soluble fibre illustration
Water molecule illustration
Challenge
The most challenging part of the project was visualizing nutritional quantities. Unlike other quantitative visualizations, nutritional elements are invisible and intangible; they need to be substituted into people’s daily life things, such as food, in order to be more easily understood.
Therefore, nutrients need to be properly matched with food and meet quantitative criteria. I did a lot of research and comparison to find the right match and made the quantitative visualization easy to understand through colorful illustrations.
Solution
Data visualization of nutrition is related to another topic, namely measurement and conversion. Measuring the intangible data and converting them into tangible food. This conversion makes the data easier to understand and gains interactivity with people. At the same time, I inserted various charts (bar charts, ring charts, etc.) to visualize the data.
I used an illustration style to visualize dietary fiber and food. The illustration style gives the reader a sense of vitality and interest.
The combination of tick marks and color blocks in the illustration style responds to my topic. The hooks represent the human body, while the color blocks are nutrition. The hook lines look like they are enclosing the color block inside, while the color block gives the shape color and characteristics. Nutrition delivers energy to the human body so that it can stay alive.
Selected Book Pages
Brochure
Tools
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
