skinned infographics

the first shot at making my infographics pretty, narrowed post-critique. some/most of these you'll probably have to click to read, sorry! tiny text is tiny. here's looking at you, full page spreads for the future! i just like words an awful lot. and i've got too much to say about dj stuff to just show stats.

this was pretty, and kind of interesting using the text as hook-ups... but ultimately not how i want my graphics to feel.

this is another version of the previous (my only double), and this one looks rather more in the style i want to use: more diagrammatic, less like fluff. (even pretty fluff.)

this display font is going to show up again! yaiy. this was my favourite so far. gotta deal with my numbers, gotta deal with my irreverence towards our fleeting sonic morality.

ILLEGIBLE. gotta take this back towards how it was before. risk taken- check. experiment- not a success.

gonna try to make that almost-timeline into a real-timeline! either icons or numbers to flat places, not both.

and lastly, super huge timeline of the evolution of the objects my icons were based off of. it does its job pretty well. (woohoo!)

yaaaaiy infographics! hopefully i'm still saying that after friday!

design being wondrous

two more steps in the process of making a poster for the marian bantjes lecture that i now wish were really happening. i was still, at this point, moving forward with both my analog bead patterns and my digital vector pattern. if you're wondering still or again what happened to the imagery from vanderslice, the bead border shows up in brick and concrete along all the corners of the building, and all the vector pattern units are constructed from that curly facade shape that is so recognizable, simply shrunk down and rotated to create different connections. first, some beads:

i started out using my old composition but trying to add some color. i then tried a great many things all at once that are all very loud and unfortunate looking, but were hopefully less "just sitting there" than some of my other attempts. honestly, now that i'm looking at it a few days later, i think it's even more guilty of "just sitting there" than some of the compositions i was trying to overcome. anyway. the last bead, i'm immensely fond of. it utilizes bantjes's infatuation with borders and framing, and with symmetry and pattern. (spoiler: this one keeps going!)

then for vectors:

i'm  most proud of the last vector pattern, the way that i was able to remove slices of pattern to construct text framing devices. (this is a very excitingly bantjes thing to do.) if i had gone with a digital for my final, i think i would've done this one. it has a level of refinement that my other digital patterns, built as they are out of overlaying complicated things without any real mathematical precision, don't quite have.
perhaps i can use this for something else someday. (student assembly... i'm looking at you! designers, don't make fun of me if you see this advertising student forum or anything like that.)

so, as i said in the early spoiler, the poster that i've kept on with is the diamond-frame. i spent the last round working on my type, to keep it from getting too static. we also just added postcards to the project. i'll post about them in another, i think.

infographic find&share

 i've got two pretty different infographics to share with you presently, from thankfulfor.com and hiphop dx respectively. the first one i think does a nice job of unifying a lot of very different imagery through a visual system. it conveys the information of how many people online wrote about being thankful for different things while depicting with illustrative icons what those things are. this tells the story of the people online, and the things that are most important to them. it paints a picture of peoples' values as a whole, compared across common priorities, all while keeping a sweet, playful look that's appropriately joyful.

the rise and fall of lil jon, on the other hand... well, it has a lot more narrative to it. it utilizes a timeline to describe his extreme success and then his extreme financial hardship along several years while backing up that narrative with some select other information such as bar charts about record sales or awards. the timeline could operate without those things, but they add an extra level of understanding to the situation by showing how great/awful things were with numbers and shapes rather than simply telling us with words. the look of this infographic has appropriately obnoxious type. 

infographic readings

as always, graphic design/the new basics is super great for getting across the basics of a concept. it describes infographics on the most basic level of plotting points of connection to build networks of information. edward tufte (renowned information-visualization superman) happens to advocate the dispersal of information without the pretty meddling fingers of designers and propaganda artists, instead wishing people could access just pure information without any kind of confusion or hierarchical bias.

(sorry, mr. tufte: objectivity, as i'm sure you know, is, scientifically speaking, extremely hard to come by, and that ideal is not only hard to achieve, but maybe not desirable in some circumstances after all. no matter how neutrally you intend to present something, by the virtue of you deciding to present it, you have an opinion and it'll make its way out in some fashion, no matter how subtly you try to conceal it. /tangent)

information graphics facilitate the visualization of relationships that can't just be pulled out of a text or gleaned from lists of numbers. we simply cannot hold so many things in our minds' eyes all at once! just as soon as we start to understand one amount, we try to start thinking about another, and then we lose both. infographics function as an extension of our brains, a place to hold thoughts still so that we can better analyze them without trying to remember everything simultaneously. whether they do this simply and transparently, as tufte would wish, or through complex, influential graphic systems that can direct the reader to the conclusion you want them to reach, is a matter of the designer.

i also found myself interested in the "diagramming editorial content" area because i had inadvertently already begun that with one of dj biography 'infographic' from the early set. maybe i'll be able to incorporate that working style into this project as it progresses.

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nicholas felton probably knows more about himself than any of us combined. having charted his life for years, he has visualizations for personal data i'd never even considered collecting. in his work, we are returning (waaay back) to the idea of design archeology. he's not writing a memoir. he's not telling his lifestory or composing a narrative or any other way to phrase that. he's simply arranging the data of his existence in such a way that, from that information, we can reconstruct what sort of person he must be. the best stories are the most realistic ones: everybody prizes an author who can capture the random mundanity of daily living, the highs and lows and grilled cheese sandwiches and stoplights. nicholas felton has taken this to an entirely different level. he's telling the truest story ever, with no judgement, and no narrator. simply the facts, from which we can draw what we will.

there's no need to explain things if you represent them clearly enough. put together enough pixels and you can zoom out to an image. you don't have to be told what it is. lots of data can come together to create an incredible snapshot of a person, or a culture, or a product or society or industry or anything.