Designing Information
In the center of their brochure students should compare a lunch or breakfast meal they receive now, with a healthier option and information about how to purchase more fresh fruits and vegetables. In order to complete this portion of the brochure students will need to review the healthy eating habits we discussed earlier. They will need to then use a budget of $2.40 per student for approximately 300 students to create a healthy, balanced lunch using that budget and local produce. I think this will be very eye opening for students, but hopefully it will also be eye opening that with a little bit of ingenuity it IS possible to create healthy meals on a budget.
I would like students to create graphics to comparing the meals they are offered with much more satisfying, healthier meals they could be eating. To do this they will need to learn how to effectively represent data through graphs and charts. On page 105, in his book Envisioning Charts, Tufte states five simple rules for displaying data effectively. These are, "Above all else show the data, maximize the data-ink ratio, erase non-data ink, erase redundant data ink and revise and edit." 30 I believe that these five steps will provide important guidelines for my students who may not have had experience representing data previously. We will tie these five rules back to the food pyramid graphics we discussed earlier. I think that the most important two rules are maximize the data ink ratio, which means all of the ink should be used to represent as much data as possible, with little ink used for frivolous information. This design will be very different from the front of their brochure that will be all ink and little data. I want to make this contrast clear to them. Also, erasing non-data ink is important because students often add unnecessary flourishes to fill space. I think by using these guidelines it will help them focus specifically on designing the data. I would like my students to follow these five rules as a mantra as they create the insides of their brochures. They will also repeat the process for recipe cards which will go on the back of the brochure.
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