Storyboard

For the first part of this assignment, I chose the image of the young girl in between trees. When I looked at this picture, I thought of being a child during the fall, exploring while on an outing with my parents. For the first iteration, I used only this picture and wrote up a narrative from the sense of being young and imaginative. After this rough outline, I decided the best image to go along with the narrative would be that of a road in the autumn. It gave the feel of a journey and went along with the seasonal theme that the first picture reminded me of. I then decided to separate the first title of the narrative and put it as a title in a bit larger font, to immediately give the audience an idea of the storyboard. This first image is aspect-to-aspect because nothing is really happening that directly explains the narrative, but the images coincide with the story.

For the second piece of the assignment, I used the image of people walking and covering their faces. This picture brings about a feeling of dread and tragedy, so I google searched for images that had similar connotations. I selected one of refugees in the Congo because it fit with the beginning of the narrative I had written for the first image. I then selected another from the class folder of the man praying. I ended my narrative with a picture I took while studying abroad in South Africa, and a quote that I heard once, “Resiliency can only go so far”. Though this gave my second storyboard a bit of a gloomy tone, I still kept it because that is the feelings that the pictures evoked in me and that is what I wanted to portray to the audience. This storyboard is the most like scene-to-scene, because though they aren't really displaying an action, they go alone with the written narrative and illustrate each section.

Simple Table to Graph

For this assignment, I gathered data from the school website about crime statistics. The statistics were broken down into different categories, such as on-campus, off-campus, residence hall, public. I decided to take date from the on-campus category, and only crimes that were committed. I displayed the data in a table from the years 2006-2009. After I looked at the finished product of the table, I decided that I wouldn’t include certain information in my chart. I didn’t include information that was only of disciplinary actions on campus if there was a category of the same thing that included arrest. I also didn’t include hate crime statistics because there was unclear information that I didn’t think would translate into a chart nicely. I did all of this on Numbers, and then opened up Keynote for constructing a chart. I inserted the chart and then customized it with my information. For the first iteration, I had the bars of the chart as the years, and the x-axis as the crime. I also numbered the actual bars themselves. The color scheme consisted of different blues. I realized that by organizing the information this way, the crimes had to be abbreviated to fit and overall it looked crowded. After this AHA moment, I switched it so that the year was now the x-axis and the bars consisted of the crimes. I like how this ended up looking much better, because then the key could have the full crimes written out without looking sloppy. I also decided that numbering the bars was redundant, so I took those out as well. For a final iteration, I changed the colors slightly and made the key smaller.

For this flow chart, I was explaining how to order a book off of Amazon. The purpose was to explain step by step how to accomplish this task in an organized and simple way. I started with the oval shaped starter labeled "www.amazon.com". From there, I used the website as a guideline of every step to follow. I used the diamond shapes to signify decisions or questions, and rectangles around a process. I used arrows to indicate the direction of the chart, and different colors as well as different shapes.
I found it challenging to decide where the shapes would go so that the information all fit on the page and areas didn't look oddly spaced. I solved this by going down first and then branching off towards the middle. I think the overall product came out organized and concise.

Final Iteration of Information Graphic

For this informational graphic, I chose to illustrate how to properly hook up a DVD/VCR to a television when there is a cable box also present. I made several iterations before coming up with this final design. In it, I decided to make four separate sections; "Parts", "Steps", "Front View" and "Back View". The steps lined up to the view that they dealt with. I used colors to illustrate where plugs needed to go in order to end up with a graphic that was easy to understand. I tried to reduce the cognitive load by cutting down on some details on the VCR and Cable Box illustrations. I found it difficult to word the steps as to not leave any confusion. I am most proud of how the end product looks organized and I think it gets the message across simply.

First 3 iterations

Spaghetti How-To

For my spaghetti dinner “How-To” design, the viewer that I had to keep in mind while creating it was supposed to be someone who possibly didn’t speak English, so therefore I didn’t use words. I used numbers to order the steps, and for step 3 I broke it down into 3a and 3b. In addition to the numbered steps and, arrows connected the pictures. The purpose was to show step-by-step how to make a simple spaghetti dinner. The biggest problem I encountered was how detailed the design needed to be, keeping in mind cognitive load while still showing all the necessary steps. I decided to make 5 steps, one of which was broken into two, to keep the load to a minimum while still displaying the message.

Ferilizer

For my fertilizer map, I decided to put organize the images in a chart format so that the audience could see in a linear form what specific product would be used under certain circumstances. The viewer would be someone in need of lawn care, and did not necessarily understand English therefore no words were used. I used pictures that I felt represented the words, as well as symbols like “<“ and “>”, as well as crossing out certain boxes to imply that the factor in the box wasn’t present. The biggest problems that I encountered were in trying to pick symbols that I thought were closest to universal. I solved them by Google Image searching the words I was trying to display and using these as a guide to what types of symbols to use. By using pictures like the sun for dry and rain for wet, I think the chart ended up as something that a person from another culture could look at and be able to determine the correct symbols and therefore which product to use.