Multilingual infographic design

An uncomplicated yet highly compelling multilingual infographic design to help generate awareness of the health and productivity benefits of good building ventilation.

Background

World Ventil8 Day is an international awareness campaign that champions better building ventilation, promoting the critical role it plays in supporting not only health and wellbeing but also productivity. The initiative was launched by a coalition of environmental activists, scientists, engineering bodies and academics, including The University of Sheffield’s Department of Civil and Structural Engineering in collaboration with Sheffield City Council.

As part of the awareness campaign, our client would be taking part in a series of knowledge sharing sessions and events, online and in-person, around the world.

Challenge

With the information provided by our client as two visually uncomplicated PowerPoint slides (one for summer conditions, the other for winter), our task was to create a multilingual infographic design that would illustrate the powerful scientific and practical evidence that demonstrates the importance of good ventilation to reduce exposure to infectious diseases and air pollutants.

Beyond the infographic design, and to reach a wider audience, the brief also asked us to provide the infographic in 9 other languages as well as the English source language:

1. Arabic
2. Bengali
3. Chinese (Simplified)
4. Italian
5. Kurdish (Kurmanji)
6. Polish
7. Punjabi (Pakistani)
8. Slovak
9. Urdu

With some of the target languages using right to left scripts, and also different alphabets/character sets or symbols, we would have to consider the singularities of each language and the order in which they present information, not just when in scripted form, but we also had to give consideration to the positioning of graphics next to text.

When working with right to left languages, like Arabic,

all content has to be positioned as a “mirror image” of the English source version.

In total, there were 20 infographics to design and print: 2 different versions of the infographic – summer and winter conditions – in 10 different languages each.

Solution

With so much key information to fit in we kept the design simple, yet still highly effective. Sourcing stock illustrations, our choice of fonts and colour palette follows Sheffield City Council’s brand guidelines.

Originally requested as an A5 leaflet, we recommended to our client that a bigger A4 size would make more impact and therefore deliver better results. We also generated QR codes to streamline some areas of the multilingual infographic design and amplify its reach.

We conceived the design to be easily adaptable to a digital format for use in webinars, presentations or virtual meetings, as the full infographic or split into bite-size sections.

“The first print run of the infographic was spectacularly well received by our project partners and trial participants, who really appreciated being communicated to in their mother tongue. Thanks again Suzie and Bryony for all your hard work on this, you were both a pleasure to work with.” – Research Associate, The University of Sheffield.