Project Showcase: Shades

Infographics might not be for everyone, but Manchester-based Freelance Graphic Designer and Shillington Education graduate, Hajra Mubashar, has recently embraced the traditional elements of infographic design and started to experiment with different ways of visualising data — creating a project to amplify various topics that feel close to home. Hajra’s design skills have been merged with a love for information and a curiosity to learn more. A unique process for someone so early within their career.

Hajra’s ‘Shades’ is a data visualisation project looking at ways in which data can be used to tell a story, explain a process and simplify a multi-layered topic. When speaking about its origins, Hajra said “The name came from my decision to assign one colour to each series. This kept the palette restrained but pushed me creatively to distinguish data in ways other than colour. Using shades of each colour felt like a good visual translation to depict the nuances of each issue.”

Shades also contains a ton of detail and research that Hajra felt compelled to cover. The presence of misinformation is rife, especially within social media and its multiple echo chambers of thoughts and opinions. Projects like Shades raise the importance of effective data presentation in an increasingly screen based visual world, where access to multisourced, complex knowledge is difficult. “Whilst it's easy to google answers to simple questions, most people don't have the time or patience to get to the bottom of complex, more multi-layered issues they may want to understand better, this project aimed to assist this need through design.”

Topics range from the UK’s prison system, the UK’s obesity epidemic and a breakdown of how India’s partition happened - something close to Hajra’s own heritage, being Pakistani. “Each topic is something I wanted to learn more about, and the series is designed in a way others can learn from” Hajra says, while ensuring its visual accessibility. “I used one font, stuck to strict spacing and grid rules and assigned shades of one colour to each series”. Within today’s interpretation of the media and how news is covered, the use of infographics are important in relaying the right facts and figures. The internet often promotes the development of premature opinions within seconds, where only headlines are read and hot takes become viral. In a rebellious nature, Hajra’s shades is unafraid to shy away from being too complex or too political, but still sticks to its well-known detailed identity, making it a project we’ve grown to love.

Check out Shades in it’s entirety, here.

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Image credits: Hajra Mubashar