How To WAP
Infographic
The basis for this assignment was to create a piece that illustrates a word or a phase (assigned by a random drawing), and I received the phrase "a dance." So, I chose to create an infographic for the WAP dance, which was trending on social media at the time. All of the colors and patterns used were inspired by the music video. This project was super fun, and inspired by the song WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion and the dance that accompanies it!
Process
Thumbnails & Color Comps
After being assigned the prompt "a dance," my initial thought was to create something more conventional. I created 20 thumbnails, most of which explored traditional ideas of dancing. Towards the end of my thumbnailing process, I started to run out of ideas. That's when I decided to create a WAP inspired thumbnail. It was mostly intended as a joke, but when I presented it to my class they all loved the idea of taking the project in an unconventional direction. My professor even suggested I expand on that concept by turning it into an infographic.
Because my composition needed to chance drastically to accommodate the new infographic style I was going for, I created more thumbnails. During this stage, I also created some color comps. I determined that there were nine vital steps in this dance, and made sure that my new compositions could fit them all. I experimented with cutting out some steps to make more space, but the instructions didn't really make sense without them.
After receiving feedback from my class, we decided the composition needed to be more dynamic. So, I opted to add a curving path to guide the viewer's eye. I also attempted to vary the size of the different bubbles. This proved to be very difficult, considering the number of steps I needed to incorporate. To solve this problem, my professor suggested I remove the words because the dance was so popular it would likely be recognizable to most viewers. This gave me more space to work with when creating my new composition.
My class decided that the first color comp was the most successful because the green and purple stripe motif was heavily featured in the WAP music video. However, once I started creating and assembling all of my assets, we all agreed that it was a bit overwhelming to the eye. After that class, I ended up using a more blue and gold background to mimic the hallway seen throughout the music video. This made everything more easy on the eyes.
The Final Piece
After creating and assembling all of my assets, this is the design I ended up with. I received a lot of positive feedback on this final piece, and I had a lot of fun with this design. My assets were created in Adobe Illustration and were assembled in Adobe InDesign. Unfortunately, I'm not entirely happy with the way this project turned out, I think I ended up sacrificing readability for more movement in the layout. That being said, I do like the final deliverable, I just think it could be a bit stronger in certain areas. There was a lot of process to show for this piece, and I think this project helped me improve my flexibility when it comes to my work because this design ended up changing so much over the timeframe for the project. There was so much back and forth, I thought it would be interesting to attempt to document my process. If I were to change anything in the future, I think I would make the arrows a bit more visible and I would make the drop shadows more subtle.
This last image wasn't part of the actual assignment, it was just the cover slide I made for instagram to maintain the relatively unified aesthetic of my page. I just thought I would include it here because I thought it was a nice little extension to this project.
