Ice Hockey Infographics

[David Strover]

Hullo Everyone,

For a while now I've been creating player infographics for English League ice hockey clubs. They are mainly part-time, but run professionally, and as I like creating this type of graphic and ice hockey I combined the two. I have attached some examples from my local club, Swindon Wildcats, that use them all the time in press releases and other teams that I just pop on the Internet.

I appreciate that that are all a bit 'flat' and not as spectacular as many of the other contributors work, but they do server their purpose.

I do have a question also though. The next logical step is 'animation' with infographics and this is an area I have little experience with. Does anyone have any advice on what direction I should take with this? I have been searching the Internet [obviously] but I have found that the advice on these boards is very helpful.

Cheers everyone
David

[gwpriester]

Hi David

Nice work. Web Designer 11 Premium offers Web Animation so you can slide and fade objects onto the page. http://xaraxone.magix.net/WD11/

[wizard509]

Looks good David.

What program did you use?

Iid you draw item in layers? Hopefully you did because the figure will need to be removed from the background,, Then animate the figure, providing that's what you want animated, If you want say some of the text blinking that can be easily done using XDPX actually the figure can be animated also but it might require considerable redrawing in each frame depending on how you want it animated. I don't know about web designer. Depending on the devices you want it displayed on, a gif might be the best bet. Swf allows tweening but is not supported on mobile devices

[gray]

It looks good, David. Be careful what you animate because you can end up with something that can be just annoying.

[csehz]

I did not know that these type of graphics are 'infographics', thanks for that and anyway look very good of course

[wizard509]

Be careful what you animate because you can end up with something that can be just annoying.

Agreed

[pauland]

They are all good. The Sami Ryhanen one is stunning.

Gary is right about being careful not to create something annoying.

If I had my flash hat on and was asked to animate these, this is what I would probably do for the Sami Ryhanen one.

I would have the all of the smaller info panels removed at first except the yellow panels.

I would have a cut-out of the player set slightly back and scaled down in size and moved a little left with some transparency.

At the start the player would move into the correct position, moving from left to right, growing as it did so and becoming completely opaque - almost as if he had skated into view.

Then each of the right panels in turn would appear, one after the other. They start off in a position slightly below where they are now moving from very transparent to opaque as they slide up into place.

Then the same thing for the left panels.

For the movement and reveal I would use ease-in, so the action begins slower and accelerates.

This is much harder to do in Xara than it would be in Flash (because flash has a timeline and scrub-able tweens).

That's my approach.

They are fine as they are though.

[David Strover]

Hi Folks,

Thanks for the very positive and kind comments. I wouldn't necessarily animate the examples as they are finished, published and completed. But as I take a big interest in this side of graphic design that is the next 'thing' as it were for infographics.

Wizard509 all those shown were created in Xara Designer Pro X. I am a bit naughty as I often don't use layers [I know it's good practice] but as it is just going to be a flat jpg or png image for a club and general ice hockey website, run by people with little technical knowledge I just fire them out as it were.

I suppose I could try the animation on Xara but I'm not even 100% sure that these type of infographics need it and if I have the patience.

All of my other infographics can be found on a Xara website I set up specifically to showcase my infographics if anyone is interested, I'm always interested in heaps of praise and nice gentle friendly criticism, I did get some for even creating this website from another Forum member whose name I shall not mention but it works for me and show off my 'work'.

Here: http://bit.ly/1GGRgHj

Anyway thanks for checking my work out and taking the time to comment and try help this silly old fool!

Cheers
David

[roly]

Hi David, here is some "nice gentle friendly criticism", on your navigation bars (but not the one on the home page) your titles are overlapping. Simply an observation.

Ciao

Roly

[ss-kalm]

Just one small correction ....