I am really proud of the infographic that we created as part of the training on E-Safety for the charity Voices from Care Cymru. Voices is an excellent organisation that supports children and young people who have been, or are in the 'care' system. I was really impressed by the knowledge and enthusiasm of the young people who attended the course and it turned out to be a really great day. At the end of the course we all sat down together and came up with a list of all of the top E-safety tips we had identified during the training.
I went away and with a colleague adapted some of the images from one of Voices from Care's existing campaigns. We supplemented those graphics with some new ones of our own. We used the same graffiti style stencil art, so it matched their house style. Part of the brief was to produce a 'poster' for a web site. as part of the training we realised that very few of the young people had regular access to computers and viewed the internet exclusively via a mobile phone. Therefore a text heavy traditional poster of web page would be totally unsuitable for them. That is why I plumbed for the infographic format. An infographic is a representation of information in a graphic format designed to make the data easily understandable at a glance.
Working and living in Wales means having to meet the demands of the Welsh Language Act 1993. It requires that the Welsh language is given the same emphasis and status as the English language. So if you receive public funding for a project, then your posters, handouts and publicity materials all have to be in both Welsh and English. In this case the training was funded by the Welsh Assembly Government, so the materials produced had to be bilingual.
Most people think that major issue would be getting the translation correct. However there is more to designing a bilingual poster than just getting the words right. One of the difficulties is that the English and Welsh phrases are not the same length or number of letters and fitting the Welsh into the same space as the English is sometimes not possible. You may also recall that the law requires us to give English and Welsh the same 'status', so reducing the font size to accommodate the Welsh (and for some reason Welsh is always longer) is not acceptable. So in the case of our Welsh language infographic we had to design both posters so that there was enough space for the longer Welsh phrases. I'm really pleased. What do you think?
