After reading the assignment we started brainstorming effective ways to tell a lot of information to someone without writing a paper. Since we could not do a mind map we ruled that out right away. While we were brainstorming we were thinking that we focused on some ideas and concept much more than other throughout the semester. We knew cognitive load, visual thinking, gestalt, and some other things were highly focused on during the class. Things like propaganda, hue and other concepts are still important, but were lesser focused on. After realizing that some things were focused on more than others, but the others are still important enough not to be left out we decided that a tag cloud would be a perfect way to represent this. A tag cloud is usually found on websites and is used as a “hit” counter. Every time a word is searched for or clicked on it appears larger in the tag cloud. We took this concept and decided that the things that were most important and focused on in the class would be the biggest, while the rest of the information were all different sizes, ranked on how much they were focused on. We thought this was a successful way to portray what was learned in this class to someone who hasn’t taken it because they will automatically get attracted to the larger words (like cognitive load and visual thinking) and then work their way around to the smaller words. The process they go through while looking at our tag cloud is like a summary of what we have learned the entire semester.
While creating our design we had to think about who the viewer or audience of the visual was going to be. We also had to figure out what the viewer would need to know. We decided to try a few different things before we came to our final conclusion. In our first iteration we had a white background with all of the words spread out, the most important ones being the largest font size. This looked confusing even to us, so there was no way that the audience was going to understand what was going on. Next, we decided that we would add color into the design and group similar words together by using the same color for words that fell under the same topic. This helped to visualize our idea a little better, but we seemed to have too many colors and we wanted to decrease the cognitive load. In order to decrease the cognitive load we turned to the four-color problem. Although we have studied a lot more than four topics this semester, allowing ourselves only four colors enforced us to show the relationships the topics had with each other. When the viewer looks at our graphic they will be able to tell which topics are the most important and how they are related to each other.
In our design, we incorporated the Gestalt Principles of visual perception. The fundamental principles we used in our visual are Similarity and Figure and Ground. It has Similarity, features that look similar, such as color and font size. We grouped the categories of the material by making the important terms, like Cognitive Load, a large font size, while the subcategories of concepts are a smaller font size. We used Figure and Ground which means that the contrast of similar elements and dissimilar elements creates the impression of a whole. We mixed in all of the key concepts, placing the ones of contrasting color side by side to create an illusion that this visual is the material we learned in class as an entirety; in a way, it’s all connected to visual communication. Visual perception principles we did not include in our design are Proximity, Continuity, Closure, and Symmetry. We did not place concepts of the same category in close distance, because we already distinguished the related terms by color. We did not incorporate good Closure in our visual, or make a definite end to the whole, to give the impression that the material we put on our visual is not the only material that you learn in Visual Communication; it’s just the important things we focused on. We did not use good Continuity, we switched the positioning of the words (side way, upside down) because the viewer could try to make a connection to two different elements if there was smooth continuity.
Personal Paragrph:
This project was an interesting way of having a final. When doing the project it made us go back throughout the semester and bring back what we have learned since day one. I was shocked on how many things I have learned, and did not need to go back through my notes, or presentations to find again. There were definitely a few things that we forgot and had to look up, but for the most part we were able to come up with what we have learned fairly easily. I like the idea of doing a project like this much better than actually taking a sit down final. A final is just memorizing information and writing it on a sheet of paper. Projects like this actually let us apply what we have learned in the act of showing you what we have learned.
