Infographics - Another Edit

So I was told that it's not a good thing to cut off the grid for infographics, just like it's not a good thing to cut off the actual graphics that represents the data because it hints at missing data. I moved around the elements a little and came up with the following...

I also change the thing from a rectangle to a square. Somehow I just felt that the rectangular format wasn't working at all, whether horizontal or vertical. Maybe if I had more elements to work with, the rectangle would've worked fine one way or another. Now I'm just wondering if putting the title and description over the grid (not covering the data) is okay or not...

Infographics - Solution

Here is perhaps what will be the solution for my Infographics project.

Changed the type to something more digital or LCD-looking, used empty circles to label the ending point for each line, and changed the color of the text. The digital type is used to enhance the idea of cyberspace. The color scheme is just based off... blogger.com I guess. Somehow, a blue + orange + white color scheme seems to suggest "blog" to me anyways. My choice of color also comes from looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Web_2.0_Map.svg I suppose.

Well, at least I now have a product! Originally I went on to brainstorm for other possibilities, but I came back to this one instead. Blogs just felt like a formless thing, so I guess I had to rely on the idea of the "tag cloud" as my only way to express the blog tags. I thought about adding in more tags as well, except the center would be extremely cluttered due to the fact that most of the remaining tags that I have are pretty close in numbers.

Infographics - Another Draft

The critique in class really helped set a direction for me. One idea in particular that I picked up in class was the idea of "cyberspace". That then led me to to think about ways to depict these "tags" with something related to cyberspace, with the internet pretty much being a world of its own and stuff. I thought about changing the shape or feel of the tags itself, as well as possible ways to use perspective while still keeping the data easy to interpret.

I then came across this image:

... which triggered a little inspiration I guess. I think the word is "connections", except I'm not sure how to explain it. Perhaps it's just tags being connecting to the blog entries, which then the blog entries are connected to form the journal itself.

After a playing around a little, here is a more refined draft for my infographics.

The lines basically represent the (approximate) number of times I used a tag. The longer the line connected to the tag from the center, the more times I've used that tag. It's not present in the preview image, but I've added some layers of circles to help define the numbers. Each ring represents 10 times I've used a tag.

Now I just have to go in and improve the look and clarity of this (since it's obviously just a rough draft), and obviously fix the widow in the description. Font choice for most type at the moment is Verdana, because that seems to be a very common web font. I might or might not change that later depending on how the graphics work out. I'm a little curious about trying the Trade Gothic font for the title, except I need to get the font first.

Infographics - Blog Tags v2

Sticking to the idea with blog tags, I remembered a concept called "tag cloud", which is typically a list of tags in which the more times a tag is used, that larger the text of that tag would be. Since Infographics is about visualizing information, I basically just took the idea of "more times = larger tag" and made another rough.

I kept the composition of the title and the description the same since I didn't have a problem with it. On the other hand, I switched the format from vertical to horizontal, and pasted and resized some vectored tags that I made in Adobe Illustrator to form the "tag cloud". I think this draft is more interesting to look at than the previous rough draft, probably due to being a lot more graphic. The problem now is how to make it look more like "blog tags" instead of just "random tags". The solution I'm thinking of at the moment is to have these tags attach to an "entry icon" or "entry profile pic" (or whatever it's called), or perhaps just reuse something from the previous rough.

Then there's also the issue of how to indicate what word(s) each tag represents. I think that's something that'll come along with the solution to make this look more blog-like though.

Infographics - Beginning the Project

Thanks to Nicole's email reply, I was finally able to come up with something for my Infographics assignment.

Below is a rough draft:

I chose to do an Infographics on the number of tags that I attached to my blog entries (elsewhere), showing the mostly used ones. For the concept, the most immediate idea that came to mind was to somehow simulate a traditional blog structure. The title would be "My Top Blog Tags" at the top, with the "Tags" part of the title acting as kind of like a profile picture. The placeholder text below the "Tags" title would eventually be replaced with a brief description about the topic, simulating a brief self-description or short bio. The "entries" would of course then be the actually depiction of the statistics. The gray squares are like icons for each entry, which I will make a vector icon for each. The subject line is basically the tags themselves, while the number of tags is represented by the tag icons with each representing an additional 1~10.

This is just a start of course. I'm still wondering if I could make the composition or idea more interesting and unique.

Type Specimen Book - Conclusions...

I've more or less finished all of the pages for my Type Specimen Book project.

I know they're probably not the most exciting spreads ever, but at least it'll do for getting the project done. Can't go wrong with something simple anyways, even if it's not the best. I felt that since I already "illustrated" the story well enough with the typography alone, extra elaborate imagery was not necessary. I decided to just go with a simple, old-style-movie-screen kind of feeling with a slight touch of color and radial gradients. All of the backgrounds were done in Photoshop CS3 from scratch.

I also did the cover.

While thinking what to do with the background or imagery, I originally thought about adding some black text such that there would be a fading effect. However, once I brushed out the lights and darks, experimented a little bit with color, and shifted the title around a little, I decided nothing else was necessary. The "mysterious" atmosphere is there already. Sometimes it's better to say less than to be absolutely clear I guess.

So that basically concludes the design aspect of the project. This was my first attempt at a project that's very grayscaled in general. I tried elaborate colors and didn't feel like anything was working. I messed around with warm grays and cool grays and whipped out something. It's strange. Maybe it's the sequence of process that I was directed through, or maybe it's just the concept.