As the most intelligent of the world’s invertebrates, octopuses are fascinating creatures. I designed this infographic to explore the unique features of their nervous system.
Media and software: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
Client: Shay Saharan
The progression of the illustration consisted of thumbnail sketches, a comprehensive draft, and a final draft.
I began this process with preliminary research on the nervous systems of the common octopus, Octopus vulgaris. An important source I consulted extensively was J. Z. Young’s A Model of the Brain, which details Dr. Young’s work in mapping out the functions and complexities of the octopus nervous system.
After determining the content to include, I completed preliminary thumbnail sketches of the planned layout.
Problems I still needed to solve in this draft mostly consisted of the organization of information, as one of its weaknesses was the lack of a clear reading order and overall disorganization. Therefore, the focus of completing my final draft was the reorganization of information and restructuring of text elements.
The first step of creating the final infographic was making the illustrations, which included the octopus, its nervous system, and the central brain, in Photoshop.
I decided to split the final infographic into three panels to improve the organization of the piece. I also worked to decrease the amount of text included to avoid overwhelming the audience with a high density of information. The preliminary final draft of the infographic looked like this.
For this draft, I received feedback that the text size was too large and the use of too many lines was distracting. I made some final changes to this version to produce the final piece.
My goal of creating and sharing this infographic was to educate audience members on the nature of octopus intelligence, acting as a reminder that non-human species can still be highly intelligent and capable even if they are quite different from humans. What lies at the heart of my interest in octopuses is that their intelligence is entirely different from ours, but their abilities to learn, process, and understand the world are so familiar to any of us. Developing a deeper respect for the world we inhabit requires that we see other species as they truly are, not obscured by human standards.