Had the opportunity to work with a college friend on a start up idea based around helping voters understand the state political process was producing and discover the politicians that aligned with them the most. As an extension of that goal, I was tasked to create infographics that helped make the lifecycle of legislation more approachable to the average person, and to highlight the important people involved in the process.
To the right is the final product, an infographic call to action on what, at the time, was an issue the Texas State legislature had passed that we thought would have some traction amongst people – legislating new guidelines for ride sharing programs.
The process of getting to this point was a very interesting one. Initial mocks, below, show the first step of understanding just what kind of beast we were dealing with : Balancing the details for the people involved, focusing on only the amendments that passed, or all of them, showing the back and forth between house and senate, etc, etc etc. On top of that, for most bills there are dozens if not hundreds of hours of debate transcripts by the time it goes from initial proposal into law. The editorial process there was a new challenge, in research we’d often find compelling dialogue back and forth on an amendment, but it had to be boiled down to a sound bite.
This was one of several initial cuts to help us determine which direction we should go when it comes to focus. This quick mock only highlights the process, something more easily parsed out of the documentation on the bill, but something that in the end is far too much text for far too little impact. This is an inherently weedy process and we would need to be mindful.
Leaning into the “journey from bill to law” I redesigned the mocks in a way that borrowed from from metro and road maps. This format would allow us to show the back and forth a bill, lend itself to creating space for “story highlights” by being visually clean, and naturally create motion from start to finish.
From here we moved from mocks to real data, focusing on adding details that helped show the narrative, the players involved and gave potential users several places to dive deeper, whether that be on the specifics on this bill or legislators who represented or aligned with them.
