What it is

Netherica was a school assignment for the elective on animation and infographics, where we had to make an infographic poster. I was new at school and didn't know how Adobe programs or animation worked, so I found it really interesting. I was already into animation, but I had never made this kind before.

For the assignment I invented a country and the travel agency that sells it. Mysterious Trips invites adventurous Dutch 20- to 26-year-olds, fresh out of their exam year, on a free trip to Netherica: a retro-futuristic nation of hover cars, saucer-shaped towers and a robot mascot.

The catch: every visitor gets a chip behind the ear that links their brain to a superserver, turning them all into one giant processor.

The poster

The poster is a travel brochure told in data. The top half sells the dream: the title, the eurotech coin and the Effenburg Tower. The bottom half gives the facts: 8 million inhabitants, population groups, politics, exports, raw materials, land use, weather and a timeline of kings with pun names like Weir Do and Meg a Bite. Eight illustrated tiles rank the top attractions. Every element is a flat vector shape from Illustrator on its own layer, so each part can move separately in After Effects.

How I made it

I started from the target group and a moodboard of 1950s and 60s science-fiction art. In my sketchbook I drew wireframes, coins and diamond-shaped banknotes, with my own notes beside the layout: too busy, less at the top, make "Welcome" bigger. A styling card then fixed the colours and two techno typefaces.

A lot of people made the background of their poster with AI. I really wanted to make mine by hand, without AI, which is why it looks a bit different from everyone else's, but I still think the idea was good. I used my own flat illustration so everything shares one style, then animated the layers in After Effects and rendered the video in Media Encoder.

What I learned

The project taught me After Effects and Media Encoder, and made me faster in Illustrator. I also learned to work from wireframes, try a new style and stick to the brief. The feedback was mostly about the typeface and colours, so that's what I would work on next.