The Push to Help Conserve Them
The Florida Atala Butterfly Steppingstone infographic is a messaging effort to increase public awareness of the rare Florida Atala Butterfly.
Our client tasked the ICS graphic designer with creating a piece that encourages landowners and landscapers to adopt Atala-friendly landscaping practices that will make travel easier for the butterfly and, therefore, be successful.
Graphic designers are challenged every day with incorporating interest into a design. We ask ourselves; how do you visually make a piece attractive while satisfying the objectives of the request? The designer could have included a single and straightforward illustration of the Atala butterfly as the focal point and listed the steps. Though this technique would have satisfied the objective, it would not have been as exciting or engaging to the audience.
For the design to be exciting and engaging, the designer set goals of what visually needed to be accomplished while still fulfilling what the client wanted to include. The list below consists of the designer’s ideas and steps taken.
Idea: Create a scene representing the route, including the two locations the butterflies will travel.
Solution: The two central locations (Heathcote Botanical Gardens and Manatee Observation and Education Center) are along the Indian River and St. Lucie River estuaries. Therefore, creating a scene along the water is the perfect backdrop and will also resonate with the audience’s location.
Idea: Create a path with multiple stops, from one location to the next.
Solution: Highlighting the Atala butterfly’s flight pattern creates the various stops needed to represent the short flying distance of the Atala. It also makes pockets of space to place the steps.
Best Practice Tip
By adding visual cues such as lines or directional arrows (or, in this case, the butterfly’s flight path), you help guide the viewer’s eye through the piece in the appropriate order while allowing for interaction with the scene.
Implementing these goals satisfied the objectives set by the client; it is interesting, engaging, colorful, and stands out.
To learn more about the Atala Butterfly, visit these related blog articles:
https://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/stlucieco/tag/atala/
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