Global Energy Use: Nuclear Power
Online version for easy viewing.
Nuclear Power Poster
This project started as an assignment in my Graphic Design II class in Fall 2020. We were given dimensions and tasked with creating an infographic poster with a steep sense of verticality. I experimented with creating my first graphs and info visualizations, and this was also my first poster project.
I originally planned to expand the poster into a series, one for each of every energy type in the world, and begun work on those, but so far only this one has been completed.
This project is my most heavily revised piece. Above is version 5, which I made as part of my 2023 senior year push to revise old classwork to my current personal standards.
Project Goals
As an environmentalist with an enthusiasm for urban planning and infrastructure, I wanted to create a poster that would help people intuitively understand incredibly complicated topics. After all, these are the topics we are asked to understand and make choices about. I believe that understanding scale is the first step to empowerment and sound, confident, choices about the world we want to live in. One of those critical choices is what kind of energy we want to generate the power we use everyday.
The poster is not for or against nuclear power. I am learning about energy myself through making these posters and my goal is at this point simply to show the scale of nuclear power in the world. If you are against it, then knowing how widely it is used in some places might galvanize you to oppose it, while if you are for it, you may take that same information in the opposite direction. You may be surprised at how much (or how little) it is used in some places. Knowing the scale of the subject is a strong foundation for any meaningful debate.
My hope is that I can make a poster series that will together form a strong introduction to energy as a whole and inform our most critical decisions.
Graphics
Here are all the special trefoils (radiation symbol) styled after the nuclear countries. The original symbol is really simple in meaning—it just shows a particle with rays emanating from it to indicate radiation. I found ways to depict every single country using nuclear power just by redesigning this basic icon, while maintaining this symbolism and unity!
I made a few basic rules for myself - each emblem must have the same sized particle at the center, keep as much of the original trefoil intact as possible, and involve only as many transformations as absolutely needed. To be honest, I had a bit too much fun with them.
Most of them are based on easily recognizable coat of arms or emblems for countries, and the others are based on the flags. The United States has the eagle seal, Russia has the two-headed eagle, France has a fleur de lis, and so on. Canada has the maple leaf, and China has the star arrangement from their flag. The UK, Sweden, and Korea have abstract versions of their national flags.
Design Progression
Some of my sketches from the final revision process. Doing away with the old composition entirely required some thought.
The Final Revision
It was difficult to arrange the country badges neatly, especially with the stark vertical of the long paper and the fact that 10 is kind of a hard number of things to neatly group together (9 is 3x3, 8 can form a cross, but 10 is kinda hard to arrange unless you like 2 boring rows of 5). I wanted hexagons to formalize the ordering a little and mimic a nuclear reactor core. As you can see in the sketch, I made a very nice hexagonal shape of 3 / 4 / 3, only to then realize that I couldn't easily add the necessary label to the U.S.A. badge because it was now stuck in the middle of everything else. That's what led to the final two hexagons being offset. Rather clever, if you ask me.
Behance thumbnails tend to crop things up in unexpected ways, so when I uploaded my early versions, I ended up having the thumbnail look like this:
I ended up being so happy with the interrupted shape of the trefoil stuck into the corner that I pushed it to extremes in the final, shoving it to the side as much as I could while keeping it recognizable, providing a really fun interplay of scale and gestalt continuity.
The typography changed immensely as I moved away from my early crutch of using a variable-width font (Acumin Variable) for everything under the sun. The final is much more thoughtful and has a strict hierarchy. Yellow everywhere had to go as I realized the many virtues of neutral grey. I corrected multitudes of statistical errors and bad pie charts. Finally, I ensured a strict grouping of the poster into thirds (title and intro, hexagons, and the charts and small print at the bottom) and reinforced a strong S-curve, leading the eye with intentional magenta highlights and the placement of the graphics. What was once my most visually chaotic work became by far the most formalized.
Sources & Image Credit
EIA: Nuclear Explained: U.S. Nuclear Industry (accessed 2020)
Images:
Hallam Reactor Core (edited) - Public Domain, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
License:
Poster, copy, design, and graphics Liliana Andersen, 2023. All rights reserved
