Today, I would like to talk about how graphic design can be used for providing information to the viewer/ user of a product. The pictures are cooking instruction of a pressure cooking device. It has many options and the ability to cook various menus with many different ingredients. Because of the variety of options, the cooker itself has so many buttons and many settings. It is almost not possible to know how to use it without instruction. Therefore, the instruction is very necessary for this product and also the graphic design is one of the most important things to deliver clear instructions to the user.

The instruction is a total of three pages, they are on separate paper, so it is a little hard to keep them, so I put them on the fridge by a magnet. Two of them (Cheat Sheet and Cooking Time pages) consist of mostly illustrations and icons and the ‘Pressure cooking quick pick’ page is mostly written instructions and explanations. Seeing those instruction sheets, I found out how important to have icons and pictures on the informative design. I personally don’t like to read or even give a glance to the page that consists of mostly words. However, I understand why it has to be designed in that way and also I even think the designer did his/her best job to make all the information clear and organized by using a chart and corresponding icons on the cooker. Compare to that page, the other two instructions are more friendly to read through and easy to follow. The written instructions on both pages look little downsized to me which makes it a little difficult to read them if I need to, but I can still follow most of instruction by looking at the illustrations. I really like the illustration of food, it could be just because I like general food drawings, but I think it is very nice to figure out how to cook by looking at certain ingredients. One thing I dislike is the big black label on the top of the page, which contains customer service information and contact information. I do understand it is important, but because of the size of the shape and its color(bold black), it just catches the viewer’s eyes right away and interrupting the information delivery.