Toronto logs raccoon activity hour by hour, ward by ward. Somewhere in those 54,000 rows sat a question worth drawing: which corner of Etobicoke has the most bins broken into by raccoons?
The dataset holds ninety days of hourly logs: units spotted, bins compromised, standoffs with humans, and how long they lasted on average. A summary sheet built on Excel functions pulled bin totals for every ward, alongside max, min and averages, and set complaints against the average weight of a raccoon. Citywide, 335,957 bins were compromised. Etobicoke's three wards became the story.
Bins compromised by Etobicoke ward, of 335,957 citywide
Eight thumbnails worked through column, area and pie forms: trash spilling from a tipped bin, a garbage truck hauling the totals, a pie drawn into a can's lid. This one won. Each slot in a commercial bin is a ward, the trash hanging out of it is the bar, and the exact totals sit where a number line would. The raccoon on top does the work of a title, and the responsible party never has to be named.
Pass 01 - Vector mask
The sketch went into Illustrator and came back as clean line work. The trash turned angular, the lettering switched to a stencil with a city feel, and the edges got squared away.
Pass 02 - Colour
Purple and yellow bring in the carnival feel. The text moved from black to purple in the same pass, so the type and the panels read as one system instead of two.
Pass 03 - Trash coding
Apple cores went into the spill so the grey shapes read as garbage from across the room.
No design decision came from AI. It supplied the litter: an apple core, a banana peel and a crushed cola can, generated in Firefly as flat vector-style images, then recoloured so they sit inside the spill without breaking the palette.
The prompts asked for simple, unbranded shapes that would survive a trace. Illustrator's Image Trace feature turned each PNG into a usable vector, so the pieces scale cleanly, take the infographic's colours, and read as drawn rather than dropped in.