2019 Year of Books

I’m a huge book nerd. I love getting lost in books. I’m also a big fan of infographics. Last year, I knew after I gave myself my reading challenge, I wanted to create something with all the information and data that would be available to me. So I created an excel doc and started keeping track…of everything. One year later, here we are.

This was a really fun personal project and reinvigorated my love for design. For most of the year it was just the process of recording basic information about the books I was reading and my reading habits and patterns. In December, I started to think about the design as a whole.

I follow a Polish illustrator on Instagram, Lena (@lenaillust) and once I saw her post about opening up commissions, I knew I had to contact her. I commissioned Lena to create two illustrations for me. The first illustration is the opening image. I wanted the illustration to be of a woman holding a stack of books. I gave Lena a reference photo of myself and specified that forest green was one of my favorite colors, and we went from there. For the second illustration, I wanted it to be a little whimsical. I referenced Alice in Wonderland when speaking to Lena. I wanted a giant stack of books and a girl to be sitting next to it so the viewer will know the books are “larger than life.” I also wanted to include some of my favorite books from the year on the spines of the book stack. Lena was an amazing collaborator and did a fantastic job with the illustrations.

Once the illustrations from Lena were complete, I started to think about other illustrative elements I could include in the infographic. I knew I read a lot of fantasy novels throughout the year and I wanted to have a section of the infographic focus on the fantasy genre, and that is how the dragon came to be. I wanted one image that could be used as representation for the fantasy genre and also be eye catching. I used a reference image from Getty and I started drawing my dragon (who I lovingly named Herbert) in Photoshop.

Another section I knew I wanted to focus on was audiobooks. I created the headphones and used the headphone wire around the audiobook section to tie it all together. My coworker Kit gave me the idea to use the wire in a fun way to create the number 43. Instead of just listing the data point out with the number 43, I also wanted a visual graph element, which is why the rows of books at the bottom were created. The last illustrative piece to come about was how I displayed the number of books I read per month. I went through three different visual iterations before settling on a the “planner/calendar” look. I wanted to make sure my infograph kept a fun vibe throughout the entire piece, so I didn’t want anything to rigid or formal like traditional graphs.

After that, it was a lot of trial and error with the layout and narrowing down what information I actually wanted to include. I also did some research on fantasy subgenres to give the genre section of the infograph more context for a viewer who is not as familiar with the subject. The entire infographic was put together in Photoshop, but various illustrative and graphic elements were created in Illustrator.