Approaching a Solution | ONE | V

The visual language and style, the form that they should assume for an audience like this was already touched upon in an earlier post in my data collection phase here.

For imagery I need simple visuals, that communicate nothing more than their primary meaning. Line drawings can be drawn by hand or vectored with clean linework. The only idea of dimension should come from varying thickness of lines, rather than shading, gradients or other techniques to employ illusions of depth. I am omitting people and animals from the drawings as I feel they are not necessary and I would like to avoid undue confusion considering the weightage that this audience places on postures, costume and gender. This audience likes to create narratives so I'd rather not give them characters!

The type or font I use cannot be decorative, in the least and must be easy to follow and understand especially at a small size (considering the size of the media). As of now I am using Gotham, and designing in English and will later have it translated into Gujarati or Hindi.

The colour palette, as mentioned before, should include red and perhaps an additional generic colour. The reason red is such an important colour is that it communicates the colour of blood. Anaemia, in the slums is often referred to as 'rakth ki kami' or literally 'less blood'.

The visuals MUST be supplemented with words, though words are to be used as sparingly as possible.

In the first approach, info is grouped together by few boxes (thickly outlined, like rooms in a blueprint) and no complex grid is followed as such, though there is an alignment that prevails and keeps the layout looking neat. I avoided putting text in columns or arranging my elements in the way I'd otherwise find most natural for modern media. The eye does not necessarily follow a right-to-left direction while purveying the material (except where text shows up and is impossible to avoid), reason being that this audience is not used to reading, and will probably, if at all, follow an up-to-down direction.

An example of what I'd like to avoid

A set pattern of reading up to down, or left and right is not required in the above, the eye can wander across the page and no specific direction or pattern is required to understand the information. However, the layout deliberately doesn't let the viewer go off the page.

In the second approach, information follows page by page as a book, one element per page, (eliminating the problem with the way this audience eye-tracks a page), spread out so that the reader/viewer grapples with very little at each turn.