The history of the currency of the UAE was an interesting design exercise. Rym Ghazal's "The Coins and Currency Detective" was a thorough story of the currencies in the Arab world in general and the UAE in specific, told through the collection of Abdullah Al Mutairi, an Emirati historian and numismatist. The article included a lot of rich and interesting information that almost begged for a complimentary visual representation of the history of currencies in the UAE. Therefore, we decided to design one.

The design process was rather straight-forward. We were given all the information, including the images, and were asked to put it together. However, there were a few different issues regarding the approach of the design of the infographic, especially that this is the first one on FIND's website. How should we create the infographics? As a separate interactive website, or as a single image to be shared on social media? How is it going to be embedded—as part of the article or as a separate piece altogether?

We decided to go with the more complicated option, which was to make an interactive HTML5 parallax designed infographic website. It was almost successful because the amount of information required a lot of scrolling. However, the interactivity did not work very well with mobile devices, not to mention how complicated it appeared when both the Arabic and the English were together. For all the above reasons, the resulting infographic became an un-infographic. This finally led us to design the simpler version — a one-page design with the text set to be read easily, and information to be visually coherent and followed through in a straight-forward chronological manner.