Transportation, especially in California, is something I care deeply about. I've been looking for an outlet to apply that interest to where I could lend some of my skills in either computer science or graphic design. To that end, I got involved with this group called Californians for Electric Rail, and seeing that they oftentimes do these sorts of policy briefs, I volunteered my time to create a more professional-looking layout for their next paper, Electrolink.
Context
Electrolink was a document aiming to inform California legislators and advocates of simple improvements that could be made to Metrolink, which is the commuter railroad in Southern California. It takes concepts discussed in a paper published by NYU called Momentum that builds off small improvements, which collectively improve the overall system at a cost-effective price.
My Job
My task within this effort was to design and implement a clean and friendly-looking theme that would make our paper look more professional. I started with drafting up many different thumbnail sketches. The cover page is what I started with. I did twelve or so mock-ups of the front page, went over them all in my head with pros and cons, and ultimately settled on one that was using a chevron as its main element to portray forward movement. I picked the color blue and blue derivatives to portray the color we commonly associate with electricity—that being, obviously, blue. Our main color for Californians for Electric Rail is red, so I chose to make red an accent color, and I think the red and the blue go together pretty well. Here are some of my first thumbnails.
After the design, it was time to move on to creating a theme template for the entire booklet. I picked a few fonts that I felt matched with the overall theme we were trying to go for and broke that up into title, subtitle, paragraph, and caption elements. I then came up with corner rounding that we would apply to this document, along with other design elements that don't play any functional role but tie the whole theme together.
As part of this project, I also designed all the graphs and the maps. For the graphs, they were easy—I just used Google Sheets. But for the maps, I had to learn how to use GIS software. I mainly used QGIS, and at this point I had never used it before, so I had to learn from scratch. It's pretty cool software, so I'm glad I learned it, and I can apply it to many different things down the line, especially as someone who loves maps. I was able to create the maps and theme them the way I wanted to so that they'd fit into the rest of the design of the paper.
If you're interested in seeing more of the report besides the snippets that I have here, feel free to check it out at this link: https://calelectricrail.org/electrolink-modern-passenger-rail-service-for-southern-california/
Along with that, I also presented the report at a webinar hosted by MoveLA and Senator Cathrine Blakespere. That can be viewed here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDDYSLUCdpc
Overall, this was a great project for me to work on. Doing graphic design exercises a different piece of my brain than software engineering, and it keeps my brain sharp in an area of work that I enjoy doing.