Don’t Skip This Major

This was the final project for Information Design Theory and Critical Thinking. The brief asked for one large poster explaining information design to someone unfamiliar with the field. I chose parents of Chinese students preparing for the Gaokao, who are helping their children choose a university major.

How the final poster reads. A horizontal band connects three stages across the poster. The left column follows the familiar path from the Gaokao to university admission, the center explains information design, and the right follows the major into careers and social impact.

The tone shifts with the structure: procedural on the left, explanatory in the center, and future-facing on the right. Parents enter through a process they already understand before encountering a field they may not.

Designing for parents

Rather than starting with a definition of information design, I organized the poster around questions a parent might actually ask: What is this major? What will my child learn? Who is it for? Where can it lead?

Finding the structure

I drew the first version as a literal path, a numbered trail winding down the page. It gave the reader a route to walk and the content almost no hierarchy. Across four versions, I replaced that path with three zones: the application journey, the major, and what comes after it.

Version 04 shows that structure before the content was filled in. Two columns were still empty, but the layout itself had stopped changing.