Vaping is becoming more and more of a trend among teenagers, even bleeding into middle schoolers’ lives. This early exposure to nicotine presents a very high risk of future nicotine addiction. While vaping is seen as the more “healthy” alternative, it is a gateway for children and teenagers into the world of nicotine and nicotine products.
The graphic shows three Juuls (popular vaping device) with bars inside of each. Each bar is a percentage of teenagers that said they tried vaping products. The darkest bars represent 12th graders, the more saturated bars represent 10th graders, and the lighter bars represent 8th graders. The Juuls are ordered by year from 2017 to 2019.
Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/19890/teen-vaping-increases-2019/
My question: How can I make this more subtle / less explicit in its meaning?
To make the symbolism of this piece better, I would recommend adding in pictures of the ingredients in a vape to make a point of how toxic consuming it can be. Otherwise for animation, it’s hard to say. The images here don’t seem mobile. Maybe having the bars actually emit smoke could be interesting, but that could be difficult to pull off.
I like the color choices used in the data set. One suggestion is that you could represent each of the bars as a jul. Likewise, you can also represent the data set values of each year as the amount contained in each jul.
I second Garet on the smoke idea – you could do it with a few grey sphere growing from the top and then moving upward and off the screen and then scaling themselves back to 0 and then starting at the top again.
I think making it animated to fill/disappear like the color is the liquid in the Juul when it switches from one year to the next could be really cool
If you want to incorporate animation, you could have the juuls fill up one at a time. I think that would emphasize how the later juuls contain more fluid. Alternatively you could give them colors of increasing intensity.
I don’t think the explicitness is a necessarily problem. It looks good and it gets the point across.
I love your sketch. I agree with adding grey smoke circles , and you potentially animate them. You could have each Juul appear on screen with its clouds, and as the rates increase the more smoke encompasses the view.
To add to the smoke suggestions, I think having text saying what demographic (grade year) each cloud represents could further communicate what the data is showing.
I think this perfectly demonstrates a decrease in health by associating brighter colors with health and neutral/darker colors with smoking, but I am confused about which statistic is for which demographic.
Also, I love how you are focusing on this issue. My dad is a smoker and seeing someone smoking was the most frequent thing which made me uncomfortable (before COVID-19).
To answer your question, I honestly wouldn’t make it any more subtle. I think the choice to make the bars look like juuls, the device your sketch is about, was a very good idea. I thought it was immediately recognizable before reading your description, and I would keep it that way.