Visual+Literacy

For this assignment I was asked to critic the following visual using the visual design principles. The critic was to include my interpretation of the visual message, the overall design using the visual design principles, and what I would do to improve the visual. 

I believe this visual is trying to say that Americans consume a lot, if not too much protein in a year’s time. I like the pictures used except I find the KFC bucket not fitting the visual. I think the hierarchy (perception) of the visual is all wrong. I think it may be more effective if 127 chickens eaten per second in America were first with eight billion chickens raised for food each year in United States were second. Third, twenty billion hot dogs and last 600 million Big Macs. With the actions I think the contrast and repetition (of the graph and the black lines and words) is fine, but I don’t really care for the alignment of the pictures (food) in the visuals. I believe the chick is too close to the hot dog, which is too close to the bucket of chicken, and the hamburger is pretty far away from all of them, which I find makes the picture look off balance. I personally may have put the hamburger more in the middle of the first blue square, then put the chick in the middle (between eight million chickens and 127 chickens). Then I would take out the bucket of chicken entirely and shrink the hot dog and place it on the bottom of the orange square, or possibly on top of that same square for symmetry. Since the whole visual fits awkwardly and small on the paper I may flipped it and enlarged it to cover more of the page and it could be looked at holding the paper horizontally. This way there wouldn’t be so much empty space on the page (proximity). I rather like the fonts (types), colors, shapes, and depth. I feel I have addressed the space and depth when I mentioned how I would change the alignment and proximity. I think the visual has an interesting message but I don’t think the pictures used convey that message, rather than just being pictures of what gets eaten, not how much Americans eat them.