JR again and my language 2 project

Looking at various examples of street art and signage systems I have once again come back to the French artist JR. 

His TED prize speech is a must to watch (re-posting again)

I wanted to turn my language 2 project into a photography project and I believe that this type of photography is the best signage system in terms of telling the story - and photography is about stories being told. JR's latest project 'the wrinkles of the city' (JR's website)

A few images:

I like that JR is using images of old people, this way reminding of how much history each city contains. Cities like people's faces with all the wrinkles and signs of the time passing.

For my project, therefore, I also wanted to focus on portraits, yet instead of posting it out in the public, I want to focus more on the inside of each person, to explore the freedom within the individual linking it to the topic of the social groups - what makes an individual want to belong to any of those groups at first place. I'd like to also focus my research on the philosophy, sociology and maybe psychology, to create more conceptual images but with an idea behind. 

Facebook explained

an interesting attempt to explain how facebook works. Nicely done graphs that remind me a lot of my own project. Not too sure who might need this as the social networks only matter when one can use them without too much of an explanation. See here.

The London Riot Rumours

A very very interesting study of the way the rumours regarding the London riots have spread on twitter. Instead of having an overview, the page lets the viewer see who poster the rumour first and how it has spread throughout the twittersphere. I wonder if this was used by the police later. See the project here.

Sketch about

A good example of a fun social design project. Sketch about sets a topic and anyone can draw a little picture of what they think the topic might be about. A visitor can either draw a new picture or edit an existing one. Reminds me a lot of the 'draw something' iphone app that everyone is using. See the project here.

The uniform project

I have heard about this project a while ago, but recently discovered when looking at the examples of the social design when doing the research for the project. The project started with a woman wanting to raise some money for paying poor kids' education expenses. Sheena took up a challenge of wearing the same dress for a year showing how unnecessary the buying mania is, as well as demonstrating a very good fashion sense and ways of combining clothes. The project received a lot of attention and there are a lot of other pilot girls who take the same challenge to raise money for good causes. Even fashion can be sustainable. See the project's website here.

Choosing movies 2

 Another move choosing piece of information design. Very similar to what I have just posted, but made in a bit more, let's say, professional way - less distracting, a bit less fun too. The part that I liked most is 'set the y-axis', because it changes the perspective completely. See the graph here.

Choosing movies

 Two interactive graphs about choosing the best movie to watch. This one I found very entertaining as it was done with a sense of humour, for example having the 'what's your tolerance level of bad movies?' option. The different options help you sort the movies until the range is smaller and you can choose the right one for you. The second picture is how it looks with various options ticked. See the graph here. Afterall, interactive information design is much nicer.

Time maps

'The beautiful Timemaps [timemaps.nl] by Vincent Meertens of Graph[s]ic shows the required travel times within The Netherlands by public transportation through morphing its silhouette along a colorful, circular time measure.

Users are able to select any train station location (by clicking inside the map), and time of day (via a slider). As a result, the map will expand at night, and shrink in the morning due to the availability of trains. The color coding corresponds to the number of hours (see legend below the map).' via infostethics

A very interesting way of showing train times and availability when I haven't seen anything else apart from the usual timetables. Not too sure how convenient it is, but the time map idea can be used in developing my final project later.

Left and right

I personally like more abstract graphs as the complex ones reminds me of school, but this is a very well done comparison between the left and the right in terms of political views. Some of the ideas probably would be hard to understand as I am not from the U.S. and not politically too active, yet I like how the graphc explores different fields, such as beliefs, family, individual. See the big version here. 

Filmstrips

 Film strips is an interesting project regarding the film making/watching data. The website allows the viewer to choose different options upon which to sort the information and gives a lot of facts about each movie in relation to the other ones. The only uncomfortable point I saw was that it is impossible to see the information about the movie if the cursor is put on the highest line and when lowered down it is hard to find the same movie line. It should be easier to find the -est movies in the categories, since the audience is usually drawn to all the 'most ...' information. See the project here.

Where does my tweet go?

 Where does my tweet go provides an original 2D or 3D view revealing the reach of individual tweet messages over Twitter's social network.

The line graph at the bottom shows the number of retweets and the actual reach of the message, itself shown in the center, over time. The circular graph conveys the number of retweets (with blue lines reaching consecutive concentric circles depicting the degree of retweeting) as well as the number of people the message actually reached (length of the 3D green lines). (from infostethics)

A very interesting idea that could be developed a little bit more in my opinion, yet the use of the social networks in the information design is probably going to be the biggest trends for the years to come.

Key study: information design examples

After having chosen to work on my final piece in information design, I took a closer look at the various examples of information design works.
One of the main reasons why I chose to do information design is that it clearly has its edge between being understandable and not being understandable - there's not much about liking it or not, it's either giving the necessary information or just distracting from what is supposed to be told. I found this aspect of information design very challenging and wanted to explore and learn more in this field.

Some of my favourite information design examples:
(original post here)

Although a bit distracting from the amount of the information given, this piece is very entertaining visually. Bankcrupts are not usually presented in such a fun way, as the audience for them usually are people who work in the bank/business sphere. However, this piece of information design makes a serious topic fun and also understandable for a non-business focused reader.

Another piece of information design that I liked was done by Matt Kursmark. This scheme is a bit similar to what I am going to do for my final project this unit in its shape. It's an interesting topic and Matt explains it: The assignment was to choose any sequence, cycle, or evolution and represent it graphically. The information was to be presented in two separate panels that were related but could also function independently of one another.  On the first panel, I chose to represent the circadian rhythm cycle and how they normally work. On the second panel, I presented how circadian rhythms can get off track due to long-distance travel, aka jet lag. 

A graph (original here) exploring the distribution of China towns in the world and showing the original places where the people came from. This piece is very complex, yet it is nicely done visually. Something to be used in a textbook, rather than be made into a poster, yet understandable and clear.The only part that I found confusing is the use of the negative space for the continents - my eyes were looking at the dark parts, rather than the light ones for the shapes of the continents and it took me a while to realise what is where.

We discussed this Reebee's Garofalo's piece in one of the lectures, but I still wanted to include it here since it shows how different the ways of showing timelines can be. I really like the traditional art feeling in it.

A very fun diagram. Pyramid structure always works.

Another diagram that is related to the piece of information design that I am working on. The lines show perfectly what goal the missions reached and the years of the missions combine nicely with the whole idea of the diagram. The different colours show what country's missions they were - brilliant. 

Key study: Visual story-telling

Over the past few years when I am into photography, I have learnt the different ways of telling stories using images. Not being a big fan of drawing comic strips, I use photography as a medium.
Types of visual story-telling:


* travels

Japan, Lithuania, U.K., Italy, Slovenia ,Spain, Austria, Germany, Croatia

when travelling and later trying to show the beauty of the places it is important to look at the pictures neutrally - same images might look much better to you if you have been to the place, felt the fragrances and met the people, yet for the ones that haven't been there, it might not bring the same meaning. I also trully don't like people trying to get themselves in each picture they take - isn't it enough being there?

* concerts and events

SHINee concert in London

Now Japan in Lithuania (invited as press)

London Fashion Week (runway, street style, backstage)

again, it really depends on what kind of an event it is that you are attending. As for concerts, the main focus is always on the band that is playing, whereas for various festivals it might be more important to capture the audience. The London Fashion Week has taught me a lot, since the visual story telling there had to be different each time and mostly focus on the clothes, which I found difficult, myself being a portrait photographer.

* DIY tutorials

DIY tutorials

I have recently had an opportunity to have my do-it-yourself tutorial published in a magazine (the picture above) and it was yet another task of visual story telling - each step has to be clear and well photographed and the most important things here is to keep things in a chronological order. What might be easy for one, might be hard to understand for another, so each step has to be well documented.

Key study: EXO

EXO is a new boy band project by one of the biggest entertainment companies in Korea SM Entertainment. There are loads of boy and girl bands in the Korean pop music scene already, yet EXO seems not only to be a simple boy band - I was really drawn by SM Entertainment's management strategies and the visual aspect, as well as the whole brand design that EXO stands for now.

Originally, EXO consists from two bands - EXO-k being the 6 member band that will be active in Korea and EXO-m having 6 members to be promoting in China. The main idea behind the concept is that EXO members come from a different planet and each one of them has supernatural powers, hence the EXO from the EXO planet slogan in each video/teaser. The members were each given a separate little logo and power which seems like a very clever step, knowing how the fans of these kind of bands usually have one favourite member whom they are crazy and know everything about. The main logo is this:

A simple and futuristic design that also makes up the name EXO both in the positive and the negative spaces. Having talked in some of the lectures about how important thesedays is an interactive and moving logo, EXO logo proves to be well thought of - 

The animated version has both the simplicity, the dynamics and the supernatural feeling that is the band's main concept - as well as an allusion to a dancing figure. Here we also see the use of a particular typeface that is used in all the videos so far:

The choice of the typeface is smart as it works both with the normal and the Korean alphabets in the same way. It also goes well with the main concept of the band and defines the shapes that EXO will be recognised for. No wonder, that they are using the same their logo-related shapes in the clothing and the set designs:

The dynamic,simple and clearly defined logo leaves space for interpretation for the set designs, make-up...

...clothes, even the dancing style which matches the concept by having sleek and robot-like movements (video can be seen here).

There are so many things involved in promoting a band, yet it seems that most of it can be related to the logo design and well thought-of concept. That is definitely what can be called design that stretches through many different mediums.

Key study: Visual poetry in my stopmotion videos

I have worked with poetry together with the visuals last year when creating the 3 stopmotion videos I have made. Two of them have words in them that make up a poem each, yet also work as little phrases for each little part of the video where they are placed. Let's take a look:

* To the other shore

In the very first stop motion video that I made back in Italy both the visuals and the words mattered equally. I had a lot of people tell me that they really liked the idea of having the words go with the images, yet some others said that they gor distracted and did not understand the full meaning of the poem. I thought about it when making the video and decided that I still want to include the words because they accompany each shot in the video and the ones who wanted to read the poem as a whole could watch the video again - actually some people wrote the words down into a text to be able to read the whole thing. This was the poem:

And the title of the movie was a key to the end of the poem - to the other shore.

In the second video I did not rely that much on words anymore. The words there are more for the visuals, than the meaning and have more of a one moment meaning, rather than a deep meaning as a text on itself.

* Doppelganger

This video was made for my Cooper Union hometest when I was applying to universities last year. In a way it is also a good example of the visual language - this was my response to the task to explore the topic of a Doppelganger. When looking back I am not sure if I conveyed my thoughts well in this video, but I believe that the visual leave a big impact.

The last stopmotion video that I have made so far has almost no words in it. It's called 'Come home'
* Come home

The idea for this video was basically its title - 'Come home'. I went to visit my grandma and collected little visual scenes of things that I thought would be related to what I feel about those words, having left home 3 years ago at the age of 17 and constantly moving around not having my own place yet.

Lately the net is overloaded with the little images of visual poetry that are so popular on tumblr...having a very mixed opinion about those images, I shall discuss them next time.

Key study: House of buttons

via House of buttons

The House of Buttons is a tumblr blog based on collecting the different functional buttons that are used in various websites on the internet. I found it very interesting as usually the buttons are something that the users do not deliberately pay attention to, yet unconsciously it is usually the factor that either makes us stay on the website and see the different functions that we are suggested to explore, or, on the contrary, leave the website because it is uncomfortable to find the different paths leading to the pages.

There are many many factors that determine the successful button design, such as the size, colour, shape, fonts or symbols used, there the button is placed, etc. Most of the Windows users know how incredibly impossible it is to use Macs in terms of the 'close-resize-make smaller' buttons being on the opposite side of the display windows and vice versa for the Mac users working with Windows software. 

Even though the functional buttons have to be comfortable for the eye, they still have to be instantly noticeable to perform their function. Connie Malamed in 'Visual Language' points out that primitive features that pop out and are most likely to control latter attention include colour, motion, orientation, size, depth, tilt, shape, line terminators (where a line ends), closure (an enclosed space), topological properties (such as a dot inside a circle), and line curvature. However, to perceive a feature as salient, we must be able to discriminate it from everything else - this means that in the case of the functional buttons, they have to be stand out in terms of the whole design of the website, to be noticed, yet do not alter the overall flow of the website design.

Seems like such a small thing, but lots to consider...? I am definitely going to pay more attention to those little button buddies.

/Visual Language/ Connie Malamed/ Rockport Publishers/ 2009/