Making infographics with Adobe Illustrator

alright guys today we're going to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator to make infographics so what we're going to focus on today is really not how to use illustrator but how to really specifically use this charting tool in Illustrator so to really take this to the next level you probably would need to learn a little bit more about Adobe Illustrator there's some great InDesign learning tutorials that can help you do that so illustrator is a graphics program in the Adobe Creative Suite the one thing I did want to talk about about illustrator is the difference between illustrator and Photoshop and why people use illustrator instead of Photoshop Illustrator is what's called a vector graphic program where's Photoshop uses what are called pixels so pixels are tiny little dots that create an image whereas vectors are lines so those images that you create an illustrator are made on these lines called vectors instead of the dots called pixels and the practical difference between that is that vector graphics are infinitely scalable whereas pixel graphics are really like you create a pixel graphic at a certain size it can never get bigger than that right it's always gonna that's the biggest it can ever be whereas we can see if we create an object in Illustrator it's what's called a vector and it can be made bigger or smaller without really losing the resolution issues that you have with pixel graphics so that's why people often use illustrator to create logos rights when you design a logo you really never know where it's gonna be used it might be used to create store signage might be used on a billboard it might be used any number of places so having that scale ability that a vector give you is always going to be better um another advantage to vector graphics is that these days you can export what's called a scalable vector graphic um out of Illustrator or any vector graphics program and that's a format that can now be used on lines as well it actually a scalable vector graphic is a vector that's made of code so you can save something as a scalable vector graphic open it in a coding program and insert it right into your HTML all code instead of bringing it into importing it in as an image so graphics with Adobe Illustrator the reason you know it's Adobe Illustrator sort of the default program for making static graphics so that's graphics that don't have interactivity that don't allow you to click on them don't have an iconic animation so the kind of infographics you see in newspapers and magazines etc I mean the reason that illustrator is the default program for that is for two reasons it's because it has this charting tool I'm gonna show you guys which allows you to make like mathematically correct infographics right you can insert your data like a spreadsheet type format and it pumps out a bar chart or a line chart that is mathematically correct you don't have to drawl it yourself and then the second reason is that once illustrator has created this infographic for you you could use the illustrator tools to literally make it look however you want right so when we make code with d3 or with c3 or with one of these graphics programs online like data wrapper we're really at the mercy of either the program or you know our coding abilities whereas with illustrator you know this guy is really the limit it's you know as you can do as much as your illustrator skills sort of allow you to do which means you can make really nice beautiful customized graphics okay so today we're gonna use a lot of the same data that I think we've used for some of our other tutorials the some of the data from code read just to make some real simple illustrator graphics the first thing I'm gonna pop up and which I already have up here is our CNS graphics template which is showed you guys this before I believe essentially just like a blank canvas with a little bit of dummy text right we've got a headline byline and a place for the source and then write a nice blank space where we can create our graphic inside of it so the template has lots of great things that allow us to jump right into graphics right it's got some colors for us to choose from and it also has examples of what graphics should look like according to our style guide right so here's some bar charts you're some Maps here's a line chart and we can use this in a couple ways you can really just start with one of these sample graphics and insert your own data or you can create your own graphic from scratch and then sort of sample from these styles so I created this really based on exactly what we used to use at the Sun and it saved a lot of time like when you look at infographics in a newspaper in a magazine right they all look exactly the same right they're all styled in the exact same way and that isn't because some computer program out puts them all in the exact same way it's because of the meticulousness of info graphic designers and art directors making sure that every graphic that goes into a publication is styled exactly the same and these kind of templates help make that a little easier okay so I'm going to pop up some data here so first we're gonna make a bar chart and we're gonna use this data we've looked at before that shows hot weather deaths in Baltimore and in Maryland over a number of years so we've just got you know the years between 2012 and 2018 and then we've got how many hot weather deaths occurred in Baltimore and how many hot weather deaths occurred in Maryland as a whole so I'm just gonna go ahead and copy that data out of my spreadsheet and I will say like illustrator is really not that hard to learn I learned it from Lynda tutorials sitting in a coffee shop you know 20 years ago and the tutorials are even better now if you've used any Adobe program in the past which I know all of you guys had it's really not a huge leap and in fact in a lot of ways illustrator is a much easier program to pick up because there are less constraints and it really allows you to do virtually anything it allows you to just select objects and start and start working so anyway the tool that we're gonna use today is this charting tool it's called a line graph tool and illustrator and it's one of those illustrations one of the only graphics programs that have this tool so it makes it really powerful on the other hand like designers always complain because Adobe hasn't updated this tool in over 11 years it's literally exactly the same as it was 11 years ago so it could it could also get better so I'm just gonna select that tool and I'm just gonna make a little box on my screen here where I want my infographic to go and it's gonna pop open the sort of spreadsheet like interface where I can just paste my data this is not a super flexible spreadsheet program like you have - it can be a little hinky as you move around within these boxes you kind of have to be careful one thing you know sort of the first thing you need to remember about making infographics in Illustrator is that it's gonna try to chart like every single number it sees in here so like if I hit the check mark it's gonna do like something really weird here it's trying to make some line charts based on all three of the numbers that we put in so that's not quite what we want so I'm gonna go back to the data here and it's gonna show me my data again so any number that you don't want it to chart you need to put quote marks around so I'm gonna go ahead and put quote marks around all of my years here and this is one of the ways in which illustrator is just really not flexible in that you know like I can't use the arrow key to move around these characters I have to use my mouse and it's just a little clunky to select and to edit data so oftentimes you know you want to get your data in the best shape that you possibly can before bringing it into illustrator because this interface is really clunky so you guys can watch me put these quote marks around here okay and now we'll just hit this check mark and it's gonna give us something much more like what we were looking for right it's gonna it's created a line for Maryland and a line for Baltimore in fact it even made a little legend for us here that's falling outside of our canvas and so you can always select right now like our infographic is one complete objects we can we've got these two select buttons in illustrator or select tools we're gonna use this first one here now which selects the whole object and the second one we'll use later allows us to select like little individual parts of the object but we want to select the whole object and if we right-click on it these three options here or what we have to deal with with infographics type data and design and we'll really just be working in the type and the data options today so data was that little spreadsheet interface that we saw a second ago and for type this is going to give us some options about what type of graphic we want to create and then a little few options for each of the types of graphics so for this specific graphic I want to make a column chart it's giving us some options like where we want the axis to be you know we can change the widths of the columns we can change some things about the value axis and how it breaks down the data but for now let's just hit OK and we'll see this is created like a nice bar chart for us right so this is actually a really good really good start so now that we've created our bar chart we can really go about editing this modify in it in any way that we want so right now I'm just gonna go through the steps of making it look like our sample bar chart which is over here somewhere I think I'll follow the styles that we see here but we could also told you later in this workshop is we can also really you know bring in different kinds of graphics and we could draw different things we'd really do whatever we want with it that's sort of our illustrator skills allow the first thing I'm gonna do before I do anything else is I'm just gonna fit this graphic into this space a little bit better and I'm not gonna worry too much about the legend right now so I'm gonna move that later but really what I want to do is just make this the bars fit inside of my my canvas and to do that I need to use this scale tool right here so you can't use free transform you have to use scale and scale is really weird because it's gonna scale all of our text to and it's gonna make our text like disproportionate so we're actually gonna have to go through and fix that in a minute which is a big deal but kind of kind of a pain so it didn't do it too poorly there let's just let me show you guys what I'm what I mean like if we wanted to make this a little not quite as high right you can see how it's really squishing the text so ultimately this is about what I sighs I want my graphic to be maybe a little smaller and it's just made the text really janky but we can fix that here and in just a second okay so it's next thing I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna grab I like sample and I'm gonna drag this over a little bit closer to my cannabis just so I can copy styles from it okay so everything that we see here is completely editable but it will take a little bit of like selecting things and really specific ways to change the way that it looks right so the first thing that we want to do is we can just match all the bars so we're gonna use this select tool that allows us to select individual objects at a time so right now we want to select all the black bars and there are some options in Illustrator that make it a little bit easier under select like there's the same so we can select you know we could say select same appearance and illustrator will try to guess what we're trying to select you can select by the same fill color or you can look at fill and Stroke you can basically try to play with these options to get illustrator to automatically select everything that you're trying to select it's not really that big of a deal here extremely have like what six or seven bars that we need to select but see if we just hit up say appearance yeah see it figured out exactly what I'm trying to select and so now I could use the eyedropper tool and I can change all of those bars I Baltimore bars make them less blue now I'll do the same thing with my grey bars select same appearance and I'll make them green and so that eyedropper tool is literally copying the same style from whatever I click with it so it makes the bar green it got rid of the stroke that was pretty easy so the next thing I want to do is I'm gonna actually try to get rid of like all these little ticks here which I think are well I mean we could leave them we don't really need them it sort of depends on what your what your publication style is like for instance in this graphic we've got we left the tick they're on the side but I always get rid of zero because it's always zero down there but I got rid of the tic sort of in between each bar so maybe that's the the track will take here too you know things are a little hinky like here that line is overlapping with that bar so we'll want to fix the Hat a little bit at any rate let's just start out you know one good thing to do in editing is to just get in really really tight cuz that'll let you select things a little bit easier so I'll just select all these little guys here well as I can I can just come over here and turn off the stroke on all those and that's where ii got rid of those i'm gonna do the same thing with the zero just hide that you know something's got to be done there I may just sort of sort of select all my bars as best I can and the day just sort of nudge everything over a few pixels there we go see that's a little cleaner down there too so yeah so that looks a little bit better so you know I can now I can start selecting like all of my type right so I can say select same appearance no if it didn't work so let's just select it all manually and here's a nice trick as I can like hold down shift and just select everything like that so I've got all my text selected and now I can sample from my text down here it'll automatically sort of change that to the styling that I want this is a little wonky now so I'm gonna line these up a little bit better same thing with all these down here right just making these little small Corrections because the more you stylize something the more little Corrections you're gonna have to make to make sure that everything is sort of lining up exactly the way that it should okay that's looking pretty good so now I've got these guys over here which I want to actually see if I can bring over into my graphic now to stylize them a little bit better some of these textiles maybe instead of those big rectangles I want these guys to be more like squares see if I can use freeze transform for that okay it's really coming together right and now I can just take the various aspects of the template that need to be changed is that all uppercase I think of us right so the text for the headline I've got a headline written over here so he related to us good I don't want to stab one word hanging out and actually everything will fit in one line so that's good okay and now this graphic is sort of started to come together a little bit down then ultimately we'd probably want to make this graphic a little bit smaller so we didn't have that white space up there change our source okay and now we sort of created this nice bar chart and we're able to choose all of our own colors and textiles and really decide exactly how we wanted it to look I'll just delete the sample that we were working with all right I'll just go ahead and save this so this is saving I almost always saved in the EPS format in Illustrator there's a default or a native illustrator file called dot ai which is like saving as a dot PSD in Photoshop but EPS is a more flexible format and it's still a vector format that allows you to edit so that's just my default saving format in Illustrator if you wanted to export this for use on the web you could save it as a PNG so if you wanted to export it for print has various print export options too okay so I'm gonna make a couple more I want to make one more I want to do a line chart and then I want to take this graphic and I want to change it a little bit so that we're using an actual graphic element instead of these bars which we'll show you how sort of illustrator can really help make these graphics a little bit more interesting so I'm just going to move this down here for the moment I'm just gonna copy it okay I'll just get rid of the graphics we're gonna sort of start from scratch here okay the way I'm going to do the next one is I'm going to start with the graphic that already exists and we'll just change the data in it a little bit so I'll just copy and paste this one over here okay get rid of some of this stuff I don't need okay so for this one the data we're gonna work with is this indoor/outdoor temperatures during the Baltimore heatwave so we have we're gonna use one day 7/16 we've got the indoor heat index and the outdoor heat index and for our increments I'm just gonna copy that for the entire day at 12 a.m. 4 a.m. 8 a.m. 12 p.m. 4 p.m. at 8 p.m. and I'll just go ahead and you know so here I can right click and look at select my graphic looks like I need right click so we can see the data it's making up this graphic now and I'm basically just gonna paste my data over top of it I'm gonna change it don't really need the date there since this is all one date I'm just gonna make it say 12:00 a.m. and 8 a.m. and etc okay and with any luck this is gonna go matically create a nice little bar chart for us okay so it did you can see that these dots are still there and that's because I drew those dots on by hand myself they're just little objects in fact we'll have those back in later so I'm gonna grab a few of those and just put them off to the side for us to reuse later and I'm just gonna grab the rest of them and delete them okay got some lines here that aren't doing us any good I'm just deleting some parts of the graphic that seemed to just be sort of left over all right oh I see so for some reason those are part of the line but they're showing up a different color so I can select those and just select this color and that should fix that yeah okay so go ahead and move our temperatures here to the outside okay okay so we've got a few things that came across a little weird and that's because we started with a template that we're just having to clean up a little bit I mean if we had started with a not with the template and just drunk throwing them from scratch you know these things might have not come across as weird but we'd have to change a lot more elements so yeah so this is coming across okay here I would say just having to clean up things a little good 60 over where I want it to be okay so now things are sort of coming into focus okay so we've got our graphic right and now um one couple things that I might do I mean if I this will allow me to if I go to type it'll give me some options for my line chart to like you know we can add a legend across the top let's see what that does didn't really do much there so it'll give us some options of marking the data points right but like I hate the way that looks right that looks horrible it puts these weird squares there so don't want that at all so that's why I've drawn my own circles that I can put along the data points and I'll basically just you know zoom in and sort of copy and paste these throughout the document so again this is just another way to sort of customize your graphic and I can put these guides wherever I want to sort of help me figure out exactly where things should be [Music] should be one there okay right so this one's in the wrong place you should be one here and here I got them all 12 for 812 for 8 okay great and so then I'll just do that same thing with my green one here just try to get these in the right spot so again this is just sort of a customized way to add data points along my my graphic so that's a place for the data lines up which is nice okay so probably the last thing I want to do I mean I need to write in my headline and my source but I want to make some kind of legend here that lets people know which which one of these is indoor temperature and which one is outdoor temperature and maybe for that I'll just go ahead and reuse these dots that I already made just sort of copy and paste these make them a little bigger so let's see which one starts higher if we look at our indoor starts higher which was kind of the point of this graphic is that oftentimes during this heatwave it was hotter inside that I was outside so that means the blue yes see these are kind of out of order so so I'll just type right indoor heat index put that one next to my blue dot here we're okay outdoor heat index we can always hide these guides so that we get a better idea of what our graphical actually look like maybe in this case we want to sort of tuck our legend down here okay now we can just add in our headline and our source so we'll just call excuse us for the headline what happened said problems look inserting these headlines indoor and outdoor heat index for in Baltimore wave July 16 29 and we want to put in our our new source right here which is kind of a long source in this case so I'm a little try to make a little room for it there I don't know why I'm having such problem with copy and paste here today so just for the just gonna say Iowa State University okay so there's another one done pretty quick okay so the last thing I want to show you guys today is how to take this bar chart and make it like a lot more interest in and one way we can do that is by sort of using some sort of graphic element so you know there's just like there's free stock image sites there's also free stock vector sites so anything any image that you bring into illustrator you're gonna want to make sure that it's a vector or image so that it's scalable in the same way that's usually like line art or illustrations are typically typically done in vector and this is aspect easy is like a free stock site so I spent some time finding you know an illustration that I thought might work so what I'm gonna do basically like I used to really like to do take a bar chart like this and replace the bar is like with pencils right because you know especially if it was about like school or something like that that's a nice graphic choice that makes sense so I don't think that that really makes any sense with the with this particular topic might delete this and just bring our bar chart back up here so what we're gonna do is we're gonna reduce this chart to just one line so we're just looking at let's say Baltimore deaths right for its case what does get rid of all this stuff just so we have more room to play with and then we're gonna replace the bar with like a thermometer right since it's since it's about about Heat so the first thing I'm gonna do is just go ahead and get rid of all the Maryland data and yes I have to do this one cell at a time okay okay so now we've got you know just one two three four five six seven different bars we've got our little legend over here which at this point is really really not needed just hide that okay so I've downloaded this graphic already it was free and the first thing I'm gonna do is just open up that these thermometers in Illustrator and grab the one that I want which is this one and I'm just gonna just pull some of the stuff out of it basically so let's see if I can find this I downloaded it yesterday illustrator there we go so I'll just grab this thermometer and I'm gonna copy it now go ahead and start a new document paste this in here just kind of try to size it into my document so it's a little easier to work with okay so um there's more here than I really need like for instance I want to get rid of all these these numbers so I'm just gonna try to go through and and a lot of these like gradient overlays I just really don't need them so I'm just gonna select them and delete them like for infographics right we're just looking for like some sort of simple representation visual representation of our data so a lot of these extra things that have been thrown into this illustration just aren't needed for us I want something really really simple so you don't want to jump you know you don't want to junk up your graphic making things cute right so okay so this is fine so I'm just gonna copy this over into my eye bar chart I'll go ahead and paste it and I'm basically just gonna set this up in a way that yeah that's actually fine thank so I'll show you guys what I'm gonna do in just a second I'm gonna go ahead and get everything set up basically just gonna okay so I'm gonna bring down a guide here we're hiding our guides right now your guys show our guides I'm gonna bring down this guide just to make sure that everything lines up correctly and I'm gonna drag this over for each of my my bars here and basically what I'm gonna do I'm gonna have these all be the same size and then I'm gonna make a little red line and that comes up to as high as the bar right so it's like the temp weather where the temperature is on the thermometer if you're wondering if I think this is like the most brilliant of conceptual graphic in the world I do not I was just looking for something sort of easy and simple that I could do to show you guys how to customize an infographic make a bar chart a little bit more interesting as an illustrator so this shouldn't be too hard here looks like we lost some of our numbers over on the side can add those back under there okay alright so what I'm gonna do now is [Music] there's this nice a range feature in Illustrator where if you select a bunch of objects it'll distribute them for you and sort of even ways so I called Alliance which distribute objects I can distribute all those equally by their center excited ndu a great job of copying and pasting them and now I'm gonna bring the transparency on them down quite a bit and I can see the where the bars should be underneath all right now I'm gonna draw just like a red line increase the stroke a little bit it's like three or four zoom in for this and I'm basically just gonna actually let's do another guide here okay and I'm just gonna draw this red line that comes up to the top right an idea is that each bar is like a little little comforter line and we'll get rid of those blue bars in a second and this will make a lot more sense doesn't okay all right so a few things we want to do now this is basically done we just need to like clean it up a little bit so you can actually see what's going on so the first thing I'll do is so let's just grab all of these guys here and I'm gonna do something called send to back so I go object arrange alright object arrange send to back I can delete the hoops okay so the first thing I need to do here is I need to so right now this infographic is all like one thing and illustrator won't really let you like edit individual parts of it without selecting the whole so if I go to ungroup it's saying you know if you ungroup this it's gonna pull apart the graph are you sure you want to do that and I do and the UM the danger here is that like if I wanted to change the numbers in my graph I wouldn't be able to do it after i ungroup everything but i need to do that to be able to delete some of these bars here okay so now this is really coming together and the last thing I want to do is I want to draw like a white box that covers up the bottom of these all these guys here so that we don't see all the stuff down here alright and now I can okay and so now we've got sort of our graphic maybe we want to you know put our ears back this is where these distribute and a lion tools come in really handy cuz like I don't have to be too careful about how I copied and pasted all those years over because in a minute after I select them all after I change them all and then select them I can align them really easily then I can say like a line them all via the center and then distribute them you know based on their their centerline or their line grab all this text here make sure that that matches these okay now we've transformed that bar chart into something a little bit more interesting using these thermometer graphics so obviously we'd want to add our headline and our chatter back up here comment we could use this instead of just using sort of a more boring bar chart so that is pretty much all I've got I wanted to mention there is a really nice Lynda video linked in learning video called illustrator infographics which will walk you through how to do what I just showed you in much more detail and really give you some you know more tips about how to use illustrator to make these graphics look really cool there's also a great illustrator essentials tutorial on on Lynda which is how I learned to use illustrator originally I also wanted to show this DVD that I have by the great Alberto Cairo called creating maps charts and infographics with Adobe Illustrator which is like eight hours long and taught by Alberto Cairo when he was much younger and it's really excellent I always have it on my desk if anybody ever wants to watch it so any questions thank you very much

Channel: Adam Robert Marton

Views: 1,225

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Id: eqUDbHf9RN0

Length: 42min 36sec (2556 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020