Case Study: Royal Academy of Engineering's Material Infographics

With vast amounts of research, key messages and concepts, it can be a challenge to decide what messages are most important and how to visualise them simply. For their National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC) report on Critical Materials, the Royal Academy of Engineering needed to strike a balance between technically competent but not crowded and confusing, yet not too simple that it had little meaning.
The NEPC team wanted support to dive into the technical discussion and find an effective way to visually summarise the technical data in a way that would be accessible, meaningful and engaging to time-poor audiences.
A key challenge was two-fold. First, trying to find a solution that could capture the key messages important to each of the working group, we didn’t want to just focus on the easier aspects, but to ensure we could incorporate all feedback in some way so the team felt the visual not only represented the report to their audiences, but also their own contribution and expertise. Second, we had to work rapidly to a tight deadline while ensuring accuracy and quality and full co-creation with the NEPC team.

Recognising the subject matter expertise required, the infogr8 team combined lead technical designer Razvan Zamfira and Josephine Brown, our strategist with subject matter expertise in environmental sciences. This enabled us to rapidly engage with the working group to understand the technical components and then self-interrogate to put forward possible options.
Once we found an appropriate approach, we worked with the team to refine the copy and find a complementary look and feel to the overall report and their brand guidelines.
We wanted to help the team get as much value for the visuals across different channels both internally and externally. As such, we created a toolkit of assets suitable for their in-house team to use now and potentially in the future.
It’s an important topic, and we are excited to have supported it in the release of their Critical Materials Report.
Since release, the infographic series has been featured by the likes of TechXplore and 3D Printing Industry.

“infogr8 provided a high quality of work on a challenging timescale. We weren’t confident that such a complex topic could be summarised well in the time given, but infogr8 surprised us with an incredibly valuable infographic. It was impressive how hands off we could be after the initial few discussions. They went above and beyond on what they ended up delivering in terms of providing different versions for different use-cases.”
Keyne Walker, Policy Advisor Climate and Sustainability, Royal Academy of Engineering