Tooning up for a vision of digitalness
How to draw and explain the digital vision for a city as large and well known as Newcastle upon Tyne?
That was a tough first question to have to ask ourselves after we were contacted by the City Council to ask if we could help tell the story of the city's Digital Vision.
Even when we decided that we could answer the need the Council had you can imagine that we had a great deal to learn. You can read a little more about the scale of the challenges here. Digitising and explaining change to public services are very challenging to both capture and communicate.
We started the project with a visit to the Council's offices in the Newcastle Civic Centre to listen to the team talk about the Digital Vision. Below, you can see the initial notetaking from this first meeting which we captured on a flip-chart:
These images gave all attending the meeting an idea as to how the story might be told and how, in the end, the drawnalism infographic might shape up.
After the meeting, mind packed full of information and challenges, we returned to the studio and worked towards creating a rough layout of where and how things would fit together in a more coherent form:
After feedback and a few amendments to content and layout (most notably the change from a future road-map to a sat-nav), we then proceeded to produce the final, full-colour version, which you can see below:
We were delighted with the response to the final version.
Jenny Nelson from Newcastle City Council had this to say:
I can't recommend Drawnalism enough! The way that Alex was able to quickly grasp our work programme and bring all of the parts together visually was brilliant. Everyone loves our Drawnalism picture, and it has had an immediate impact in improving how we communicate and share the work we are doing!
That would be a key part of our At the Studio service.