I work as a science communicator at a planetarium. Part of my job is making social media posts explaining the latest space and/or science news.
I’ve mentioned before that I want to get more into information graphics, and I would love to be able to create cool things like science comics and hand-drawn infographics more often, but realistically that’s not always possible. But I figured that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing…maybe I can’t make a comic, but I don’t have to settle for a regular text post either. So I’ve been trying some kind of middle ground…now when I have to make one of these posts, I try to ask myself—is there a more visual way to show this? and can I make it in Canva at my work computer?
And so, when I manage to come up with something I find interesting, I’ll hyperfocus on my desk and stay there until it’s done. Kinda like this:
This first one was done as we stepped out of daylight saving time. Talking about daylight savings and timezones is always confusing, and everyone has opinions about it, so I figured the best approach would be to build a little graphic to show the sunrise and sunset on the day of the post with/without daylight savings, plus in the timezone that we should be in geographically.
This next one is a post about the Artemis 2 mission—we’ve seen the picture of the figure-eight orbit around the Moon, and we’ve seen the (incredible!) pictures taken during the trip, but I wanted to put both of these together in some way. Therefore, this:
And lastly, here’s the original sketches—I made both of these at home while doing something completely unrelated…you could really say “I had a vision”. Click on the images to see the full thing!
These might not be very impressive from the outside, but for me it’s been an important mindset shift—making things fun! playing to my strengths! it’s a step in the right direction that I wanted to document.