Behind the scenes
Did my design decisions hold up?
Coming up with a visual language for a project about Yemen’s ‘invisible war’
In December 2018 DATA4CHANGE and The Yemen Peace Project published Visualising Yemen’s Invisible War, a long form data-driven story about air-strikes and the ongoing geo-political crisis in Yemen.
A few months later, reflecting on the process and information design of the piece, I gave a talk called The Best Laid Plans at Visualising Data London at the Microsoft Reactor, which was later published as a story in Towards Data Science.
That talk was about the logistical challenges of working on the story, like cleaning and consolidating data, and identifying aspects of the story that could be represented visually 🤓.
I thought that was it, this project had been put to rest 😅, but then a few weeks back the story was long-listed (and now shortlisted!!!) for the Information Is Beautiful Awards in the Humanitarian category [boo yeah!]. It got me thinking again about how unwieldy the whole project had been, and this obviously meant… REFLECTION TIME!
When I first went back to the project I was relieved to find that I did not hate it!
Usually when I look back at my older stuff the mistakes are glaring, the amateurism obvious. I begin taking dozens of mental notes of all the changes I would make if I were to start all over again. All while maintaining a public facade of calm and stoicism of course. I’m pretty sure this is a common trait among designers. Am I right?
But, when I went back to Visualising Yemen’s Invisible War, I was chuffed with what I saw. It was a super odd feeling. I felt like I had reached some professional milestone. That default feeling of dread (or worse, apathy) I have when viewing my own work just wasn’t there… It was almost like I knew what I was doing all along.
By this point I had enough distance and emotional strength to return to the design and really explore how I had come upon the final visual treatment.
And I don’t mean “come upon it” as if the design and the concept behind it had always existed and simply needed to be ‘discovered’, but rather how I had tried many options before finally selecting one after endless feedback loops with the rest of the team, partner organisations, friends, and (when totally desperate) my parents.
My usual process is to start by collecting images to help me direct the creation of the visuals. Colours, shapes, and the overall feel and aesthetic. There were photographs of Yemeni architecture with mud brick buildings intricately painted and decorated; the colours echoed the red and ochre of the desert sand and the blue of the cloudless skies.
Some of the early mockups used extreme versions of this colour combination, with canary yellow set starkly against a midnight blue. This was a direction that could easily have been developed some more, refined and tweaked to echo the lost grandeur of Yemen.
While design is an iterative process, it seldom successfully delivers in isolation. So, when I started receiving drafts of the story from the editorial team, it made me rethink those uninspiring and cold midnight canary visuals. It was copy snippets like these that kickstarted that process:
“The Saudi and UAE-led coalition’s intervention — dubbed Operation Decisive Storm”
“Yemen has long been the poorest country in the Arab world. Today it is the site of a horrific, internationalised civil war, and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”
“Since the start of the Saudi-led intervention the U.S. has provided logistical and intelligence assistance to the coalition’s air campaign“
There were words in this article that needed to be repeated visually, not least because large columns of text are intimidating but also because the graphics help add an extra layer of information. The graphics also needed to ease the reader into the story.
The war in Yemen is not a light topic and the design had to use existing visual ideas to anchor the reader to something familiar. I needed to surround the piece with visual clues. The graphics did not need to be soothing or calm. They needed to be relevant, informative, and not overly demanding.
By this time, we had identified our primary target audience as US residents and the piece focused on US legislation and the involvement of US troops in the Yemen conflict. It spoke about specific heads of state, precise political manoeuvres, and covert deals.
The graphics needed to remind these readers that although the people directly affected by this story are thousands of miles away, the US is a key antagonist.
Again the copy provided key phrases that I could use as inspiration for a bold new design direction:
“Operation Decisive Storm”
“internationalized civil war”
“administration has quietly increased U.S. support for coalition operations”
I started with the most basic item, a map locating Yemen. There was no doubt that it would be useful to start with pointing out where Yemen is. Once I had a few of these sketches I returned to colours but couldn’t quite get behind any of the new colour combinations and I was unwilling to return to the original yellow-blue.
Hoping to find some inspiration outside of map graphics, I shifted my focus to typographic explorations which I hoped to use for social media sharing. For the typography I settled on red and blue to make the words really stand out.
The red and blue against the white of the canvas seemed to work, but I wasn’t entirely convinced until I applied this colour to a mockup of the story. Even with placeholder copy, this red and blue seemed to work immediately.
It took me a hot minute before I realised that the colours of the star spangled banner were exactly what this story needed.
The lack of transparency that has afflicted the entire conflict in Yemen was a recurring theme. Right away I gravitated towards using redacted black rectangles to characterise the conflict, painting a picture of a crisis that has been censored, obscured, edited and never fully examined in the public sphere.
The black rectangles were not just used as a visual trope for the rhetoric around Yemen internationally and specifically in the US. I also coupled them with grayscale photographs and images cropped within different shapes to reinforce how the entire picture of the conflict is fragmented and incomplete.
It is easy to get carried away with design. Overwork something and it feels contrived; under-do something and it seems unprofessional; use minimalism incorrectly and the project seems uninformed. The one image I sought out time and again to anchor myself was the 2013 Penguin edition of 1984.
The single black rectangle on the Penguin book cover reminded me how simplicity can work, and that it helps to rely on existing visual tropes to convey emotion.
Using waves of red and blue as chapter breaks helped reinforce that the piece is about the US, its foreign policy and trade, its governmental frameworks, and its undeniable role in Yemen. I hoped that the colours of the flag would remind US readers that although the war is happening in Yemen, the decisions are made on American soil.
The photographs of the politicians and leaders involved were treated similarly, to reassert that this civil war is not some distant bugbear that refuses to disappear, but rather a result of domestic lobbying, business interests and political machinations.
One of the most powerful aspects of this piece were the personal stories of people living in Yemen, enduring a daily struggle just to carry on with their lives.
These illustrated accounts lay bare the loss and hardship Yemenis face and remind the reader that behind this political conflict are real lives and real people who are suffering. Each of these stories link back to a specific air strike and how it has changed their lives.
I like to think that while I worked on this project I was aware of the weight of my design decisions, how the colours, typography, photographs, graphics, annotations were all relevant, and how they were going to affect the reader.
This may be a grand claim, but I do think it is true, and I think it is one of the reasons I can come back to this project without experiencing a shudder of self-loathing. This project was deliberate and intentional, and each and every design decision was taken through logical reasoning. It is this reasoning that I can still appreciate.
Oh, is this what growing up feels like?
