Graphic Design
October 2020
Want to impress your friends next time you have a party? Bake some soft pretzels—it really isn’t as difficult as it sounds. This infographic, adapted from a Sally’s Baking Addiction recipe, will show you how to get it done.
For both the main pretzel illustration and the ingredient illustrations, I relied on a style using blurs and shadows.
For the instructions, I used a rougher illustration style that, in which I intentionally had colors drawn outside the lines.
In my Infographics class at the University of North Carolina, we were tasked with creating an alternative story form—something that could be written, but that would be enhanced using infographic techniques. I love baking, so I settled on making a piece about the best recipe I’ve found in the past few years.
I initially struggled with the layout for this piece. This, my earliest iteration, looked a bit too much like a Hello Fresh recipe card, so I continued to play with more dynamic arrangements.
I built this infographic around its primary illustration, which I created using an Adobe Illustrator technique that combined gradients and blurring. I decided to retain this style when drawing the recipe’s ingredients, to maintain consistency for all food products in the infographic. When making the instructions, though, I used a sketch style in which outlines and fills were intentionally offset from one another. After I had created all of my assets, I experimented with the infographic’s layout before selecting the current form.
This infographic is now on my refrigerator—I use it regularly.
This project gave me an important experience: creating a step-by-step visual guide using detailed artwork. While I had created visual guides before, this was the first that really tested my illustration skills. On top of that, the project gave me the chance to bake some pretzels—you know, for research purposes.
