Herons, from your calf to your chest

As an amateur birder and interpretive nature guide, I like to include information about the most common and the special birds we can see on my tours in Vieques. When I started studying the local birds a bit more I was surprised to find out that our group of herons range in size from 12 inches to 45 inches give or take a few.

It inspired me to create an info graphic comparing those birds to an "average" height person of 5'6" (66 inches). I collected the height information for the birds from the book Aves de Puerto Rico by Biaggi, published in 1970, and from the Cornell Institute's All About Birds page.

I then took some source photographs (off the Internet) and put them into Inkscape (the open source version of Illustrator) and I silhouetted them by drawing an outline, creating a path from the outline and then filling in the path with black. From there I created a chart, first using Open Office's Write program and overlayed the silhouettes on the chart's bars, proportionally re-sizing them by eye to the appropriate dimensions. I did fact check with my local FWS office regarding how the measuring of birds is done in field guides (from their feet to the crown of their head).

Afterwards I recreated the chart in Inkscape again so that the whole thing could be re-sized to whichever dimensions were needed without the image becoming pixelated (I saved it as a vector file: .SVG-plain so that it could be imported into Illustrator by another graphic designer).

And there you have it!

On Making an Infographic

You never know where inspiration will strike. I wanted to make a sign to alert people about the things they could recycle in the town where I live in Puerto Rico and at first I was just going to make a list. Then I had two thoughts, writing the same information in two languages is tedious; and, what if the person "reading" the sign doesn't read English/Spanish anyway? (We have visitors from all over the world.)

So I decided to make a sign using pictures. Over five hours later and with the input of a few people, I got this:

This is with "borrowing" images from the internet. Imagine if I'd had to create the icons from scratch. I'm not a designer and I'm not planning on selling this- just wanted to make a neat and attractive graphic that I could print on a label and slap on a bin.

I used the GIMP software (open source Photoshop alternative) to create the image file. The project file has 14 layers. Upon reflection, I should have probably made it in Scribus (open source InDesign alternative.) Oh well. I still have the original project file, so I could import the individual images should the desire strike me.

I consulted several YouTube videos and the online GIMP documentation to do all sorts of things like creating diagonal lines, making vertical text and using keyboard shortcuts. Personally, I think the rinse to avoid bugs instructions is fairly genius.