Course Description

Effectively communicating your message to your readers is an important skill that every journalist should have. With the growth of mobile and digital media comes the opportunity to communicate your story visually. This course is designed to help digital journalists identify, brainstorm and communicate their ideas using visuals. Participants will learn the necessary skills that go into conceptualizing, designing and the delivery of infographics. The field of infographics involves combining information and graphic design. As such, the focus of this course will be in helping journalists gather, process and visualize information in a way that quickly helps readers better understand the stories that they consume.

Course Objective

At the end of the course, participants should:
- Understand the rules of functional design
- Understand the phases involved in gathering, processing and delivering information
- Better communicate with designers and developers
- Learn how to present their infographics to clarify their stories
- Learn how to think creatively about delivering their stories

Course Outline

• Introduction:
- What are infographics?
- What are not infographics
- History of infographics
- Role of visual storytelling

• Who is involved?
- Editorial workflows and teams
- Role of the producer
- Role of the designer
- Role of the developer
- Role of the editor

• Interactive storytelling
- Defining the story
- Forming the narrative
- Role of distribution on your story
• How does it work?
- Getting data
- Cleaning and analyzing data
- Delivering data

• Types of infographics and visual stories
- Static graphics
- Zooming graphics
- Clickable graphics
- Animated graphics
- Video graphics
- Interactive graphics

• Infographic workflows
- Checklist before starting your story
- Checklist while designing
- Checklist before publishing

• Working on infographics without a designer
- Infogram
- Timelines
- Maps
- Sliders
- Animations

• Trends in visual storytelling
- Interactive data visualizations
- Animated video explainers
- 360 degree and VR storytelling