It has been very difficult to choose the topic for my story and I still haven’t completely decided. Maybe this happens when you have too many options and no boss to point to one specific thing and choose in your place.

Stories dealing with energy issues are common these days in the worldwide media. So there is another requirement for my story as a consequence to this trend: originality; not only in terms of design or format, but also in the choice of subtopic, data relations and comparisons.

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One Story, Three Graphics: How To Effectively Create Information Graphics For Different Formats is the title of my thesis. I need to finish it by the end of March. It is a non-traditional master's thesis, meaning that it combines a written part (literature review, research methods and findings) with a practical part and results in a project.

This project aims to look from a producer’s perspective at various ways in which information can be relayed to the public with the help of infographics. My work will focus on three formats: static, interactive and motion. In order to understand how information graphics relate to each of these formats, I will try to identify the specific features of each format. The final result of the project will consist in three types of graphics for the same story:

(1) a static print graphic to be published in a magazine, whose profile will be described later;

(2) an interactive graphic to be published on the website of the same publication;

(3) a linear motion graphic for the same publication, delivered as a short movie that could be published online (on the website or as a viral, through social media tools) or broadcast by a television station or other video channels.

During the whole project, I will use The Graphics Experiment blog, to note the challenges and experiences that I face. The final products will live on a new website designed for this purpose and could be used as the starting point for a future research experiment on graphics usability, either using eye-tracking methods or a survey. 

Research questions

One story, three graphics aims to go through the whole process of creating the graphics for each selected format (from choosing the topic to collecting the data and using it in a relevant way for each format, then storyboarding and designing the graphics) and answer the following questions:

1. What type of information is relevant for each graphical format?
2. What types of information visualization techniques work better for each format?
3. How can designers effectively create graphics in three different formats for the same story?