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ORGANISATION, CATERGORIZATION & REPRESENTATION I Found that David McCandless’ work helped me find an interesting direction to go in, when it came to designing my Info Graphics. His use of colour stood out for me along with his imagery. I wanted to steer clear of the standard, dull and boring graphs and charts and try to create something that represents what data I am looking into. It makes it more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. His “Left Wing & Right Wing” Graphics inspired me to create a simple yet close replication of an iPod, as McCandless has done with buildings, people etc. As you can see with my sketches I started off with doodling out general graphs and charts, but realised they weren’t that interesting. So from looking at McCandless’ work and my continuous doodling of ideas I manage to come up with concepts that I enjoyed. From visiting the Pitt Rivers Museum I realised the various ways you can organise and catergorize your objects. And inspired other ways I got group different objects. Had this been something I saw prior to already deciding upon my data I may have found different information to display. I used Illustrator to create my two Info Graphics and although it took quite a while to finish, I really enjoyed the process, as I am quite used to working with Illustrator. It was fairly straight forward in trying to create the style of design I was aiming for, simple yet being able to display numerous data. Playing around with ideas for presenting the data. Starting off with general graphs and charts and then moving on to a more graphic approach with using imagery relating to the data I have. Having the theme around iPods was my favourite idea, so I just kept drawing them until I found the best outcomes. I quite liked the sketch where the data was shown in the screen of the iPod, as if you were scrolling through your iPod just looking at data. The mapping idea stuck for quite a bit, I couldn’t shake it from my head. The first was intended to be more of a tree, but I found that it got a bit to cluttered with the artist names and song titles. I tried making space by inverting the shape of the tree. But it ended up looking too much like a timeline for my liking. The next one is a more based around the branches with the headphones lining up much better in my eyes. It just needed to look less box like. These had a more tree like feel to them and to me it started looking like it could be a poster for a gig and less like a schematic or diagram, which I quite liked. I started on the headphones and how I would show the text for the artists, song titles and plays. This is where I wanted to bring in colour to show which song belonged in which genre. Originally set on the idea to have a circle behind the text, I had the idea of having the number of plays behind the text in the colour of genre. Unfortunately when it came to creating this on Illustrator it made the text hard to see, so I decided to keep the number of plays in the colour of the genre, but just make them smaller and sit them under the artist and song title.
