Sunday, April 20, 2008

Statement

This project was a challenge all around. From the very beginning I had trouble with every aspect of this assignment. Clearly organizing my information, creating a consistent magazine layout, choosing the typefaces, etc. I tried to make my system of infographic information multileveled and complex, just as a crime scene investigation would be. If anything it was good copy writing practice. I learned more than any other project the importance of evaluating a hard copy. Working with the magazine spreads in indesign seemed extremely different from the hard copy. The scale change really had an impact on the composition.
Color was a challenge simply for technological reasons, working from photoshop, to illustrator, to indesign presented me with a most horrendous time in color correction.
Legibility was something else I grappled with. This is a relatively small space for the amount of information my article contained.
The application of my icons in this project led me to a pair of discoveries, one being that I enjoy working photographically, due to the richness that if offers a project, and the other is that I hate artificial light due to the orange quality it gives everything I photograph.
While working I was trying to decide what it was that made an information graphic easier to grapple with than a block of text. I decided that it's ability to engage the viewer is what makes it a more useful too. I tried to use this to my advantage, by giving the viewer something to engage with. The lines leading to things are supposed to be a sort of connect the dots that require viewer participation in order for the graph to make sense. While also being conceptually consistent.