An infographic assembled piece by piece

An infographic has to tell itself before it is read. If you need the call-outs to work out what it is about, the illustration is not doing its job.

The subject here is the balance between transport, city, industry and nature, with five text blocks hanging off specific points in the scene.

The globe works as a mental map: air at the top — plane, helicopter, boat — landscape on the left, the urban fabric on the right and industry at the bottom, tied together by a road running down from the city to the factory that doubles as the reading path.

Elements were drawn loose and at the same relative scale, so they could be moved around until no call-out line crosses another. The five leader lines run horizontally and end on a dot over the element they describe: you can tell which text belongs to what without numbering anything.

The dark petrol-blue ground leaves the green of the globe and the white of the text as the only things that shine.