Elizabeth Alexander

Illinois Atlas

Process

I was assigned to curate, and design an atlas for the state of Illinois. This process was heavily research based; relying on sifting through statistics to find the most interesting facts about Illinois. The objective of this project is to control visual and informational hierarchy.

From here I outlined and categorized the different types of information, and assigned a hierarchy of importance to each, so that once these became visual representations, they were assigned a percentage of the page.

I wanted to express the facts specific to Illinois, everything from the state bird to what it is best known for culturally.

Finding a visual language was difficult, I began by sketching out boxes and columns for the different categories of information. Which I soon realized was too gridded, and lacked visual interest and hierarchy. I had also initially planned on having the map be a larger portion of the poster, but realized it would just be reiterating what was shown on the other side.The final atlas still uses the map (of the whole country) that fades out, so there is a reference as to where Illinois lies in relation to its neighboring states.

Illinois is one of the few states that experiences most types of natural disasters. Using Google news, I found the cities that experienced some of the most detrimental damage (whether that be physical to the city, or in amount of people killed/injured). Finding the visual language that spoke to this was difficult, after many sketches and thumbnails, I decided I would organize the disasters by location as well as color-coded types of disasters (floods, fires, tornado's, etc.).

The Great Chicago Fire was the most destructive disaster to occur in Illinois of all time--which is directly related to the rebirth of Chicagos architecture, some of the most diverse architecture in the world. Because of this, I dedicated a large portion of the poster to some of the most famous buildings of the city.