Assignment 5: Explanation Graphic

Original Lake Effect Snow Explanation Graphic

Updated Lake Effect Snow Explanation Graphic

For this assignment, we were told to find an existing explanation graphic that is poorly designed and make a better version of it. With all the talk about the snow coming on Wednesday, I spent a few minutes wandering around on snow articles on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake-effect_snow) and found an interesting graphic for how lake effect snow works. According to the overly simple graphic, water evaporates, condenses into clouds, then snows over land. After reading the article, this is not exactly how it works. According to Wikipedia, there are other factors involved for the creation of lake effect snow such as temperature, wind, and certain distances necessary for lake effect snow. After doing this research, I worked out how to take the basic graphic of the water and clouds and adding the missing information so the viewer will hopefully not have to read through the whole article in order to understand the process of lake effect snow. I first started with figuring out what facts were missing from the existing graphic which were the other side of the water mass, the necessary temperature change, the factor of strong winds, and the appropriate distance of water wind need to blow across for lake effect snow to take place. I first drew the original graphic and expanded on it to include the other side of the water mass to show how one side is sunny and clear but the other side is under heavy snow. Next I added in the building cloud mass as it moves across the body of water until ultimately snowing on the other end. Next I added some rippling blue arrows to show the wind. At this point the visual was purely graphic and needed additional information that would only confuse the viewer if displayed graphically. The temperature was written in the water and above the clouds to show the necessary temperature change for lake effect snow, I also showed the heights in feet of where this temperature change needs to occur, and finally I added in the distance of water required for snow and the typical distance over land this occurs. While adding this information in, I converted the metric values found in the article into American measurements so the viewer would have a better understanding of the temperature and distance. During this process I was thinking of the visual about Napoleon's Army's failure at Moscow in how it included several different types of information that were cohesively explained on the visual, so I attempted to include the distances and passing of time for the visual. Although I thought it might not have been entirely necessary, I included four short explanations at the bottom of the graphic that explain what is happening within the graphic.

Overall I thought this assignment was going to be more difficult than it really was mainly because I assumed that it would be hard to find a poorly designed visual that needed to be improved. To my surprise, I bumped into one on Wikipedia, which looks as though someone made without any consideration of the viewer's perspective. Once I read about how the process of lake effect snow works, making what I thought would be a better visual seemed to be relatively easy.