In 2015, the DWRL retired all of its existing publications in favour of a single publication stream, compiling material from all of our staff members on the DWRL homepage. During the transition to this new model, the admin team composed blog posts outlining our past projects and publications; my contribution was this infographic farewell to Zeugma, the DWRL’s podcast about rhetoric and technology, for which I served as project leader in fall 2014. This infographic was composed in Photoshop and represents all of the data about Zeugma’s run available in our LibSyn account.
The visualisation, like its content, is literally built on Zeugma’s episodes; I used a list of the regular season episode titles as the background for the infographic, then layered over them text and graphics outlining the content, production, reception and circulation of the series as a whole. The turquoise and orange colour scheme is taken from Zeugma’s ‘Z’ logo to ensure a consistent visual scheme across the publication: this is also true of the promotional materials I produced for Zeugma during my tenure as a team member and project leader, which were my first ‘experimental’ Photoshop projects.
While I could have easily — and likely far more rapidly — composed this piece using an infographic-specific app like PiktoChart, I would have sacrificed the fine-grained control possible when starting with a blank canvas in Photoshop. It also allowed me to incorporate edited pictures into the final piece more readily — for example, I added colour to a blank map to indicate the countries in which Zeugma has listeners and reshaded the headphones at the bottom right to match my established colour scheme, as well as creating the curved arrow on the map using Illustrator.
I learnt the skills necessary to complete this visualisation primarily through doing, although I had a stable footing for my experimentation thanks to some formal training and plenty of practice in InDesign during my previous career in print publishing — I’ve found that being comfortable in one element of the Adobe Creative Suite is a big step up in tackling any of the others. I’ve since conducted informal training for other DWRL staff members in using Photoshop.