From my research and planning for this project, I knew that I would need to create some original assets to tell the narrative of the Apollo 11 story in an immersive way. I am in no way an illustrator and as I had decided to use lots of real-life imagery in my prototype, the content I created needed to fit in with this style. Therefore, I decided to create three videos and some infographics to add to my text content and provide additional information which would help my users become immersed in the story.
Once I knew I would need to create original assets, I started planning what assets I would need to make. I started by making a list on paper of what I would need to create. At this stage the design for my prototype was only starting to take shape, therefore, I knew I may need to create more or change these assets. However, having a starting point and a list meant I could start to source assets and inspiration for my creations.
Now I had an idea of what infographics I wanted to include as part of my prototype, I started looking online for inspiration. As the Apollo 11 story has been covered many times for websites, films, TV shows and books I knew there would be infographics already created that could provide me with inspiration for my new assets.
The first infographic I wanted to create was to illustrate the Saturn V rocket, this was an extraordinary machine and I wanted to give my users a sense of its scale and power. There are hundreds of infographics online showing the Saturn V and information about it. From those that I looked at the ones below stood out to me as the ones I wanted to most closely replicate. I did not want to go into the illustrative detail of some of these, but the idea of taking the whole rocket and then splitting it up to show the individual components that make the whole was an idea that appealed to me. I decided that a simplified version of this would be what I aimed to create.
The second part of the narrative that I felt would benefit from an infographic was the journey to the moon itself, this was not a simple straight A-B journey requiring a trans-lunar injection after a single orbit of Earth and 28 wider moon orbits alongside two smaller orbits to prepare to land on the moon. Again, there are lots of different styled infographics out there to show this journey, some are very detailed while others are more simplified, the ones below I thought were the closest to the style I was aiming for and are what I will use to create my infographic.
While I could have jumped straight into Adobe Illustrator and started to create my infographics digitally, I decided to plan them out on paper first to allow me to explore different layouts and ideas. This allowed me to discover what parts of creating the infographic would be the hardest and any further research I needed to do.
My first two sketches above showed how hard it can be to get the ratio of height to width of the Saturn V rocket correct and how if not correct it doesn’t look anything like the actual Saturn V. This would be something I would need to consider when creating my final piece.
I had considered the idea of making a visual comparison between the height of the Saturn V and a more known object, such as a double-decker bus. However, in planning this out I discovered that this would be challenging due to needing to stack 27.75 illustrations of double-decker buses on top of each other. The challenge of making everything to scale seemed like too big a task so I decided to leave this idea and provide information using a table beside my illustration.
Above is my final sketch for the Saturn V infographic and I finally got the height-width ratio close enough to look like the real rocket, I also explored how I could split the rocket into sections and provide information about these. This was an opportunity to add interactivity to my prototype as I could create the infographic in a way that if users hovered over an individual section they would see an overlay that showed that specific part of the rocket and gave further information on it.
