Month: November 2014

I have begun to collect data for my poster. To do this, I created two tallies, one for my male Facebook friends, the other for females. I went through my entire Facebook friends list and separated them into male and female. From the information I gathered, I have found out I have a total of 205 Facebook friends that are female, whilst I have 195 friends that are male. This information I can then use on my poster, by creating a graphic in two separate colour to represent the two sexes. 

I shall also use this information to sub-catagories things in the poster, for example the amount of males that went to the same school as I did etc. 

This is a screen shot from my personal Facebook profile, to show how many friends I have, in total 403 (3 of these belong to a business, so in fact I have 400 friends)  Facebook has used information from my own profile which I uploaded to categorise my friends into six groups. These are:

  • Recently added: people whom I have recently added as friends on Facebook.
  • Work (7) : People whom I used to work with as Bose Corporation.
  • University (47) : People who also attend Bournemouth University.
  • High School (147):  People whom also attended Bicester Community College, the secondary school I attended.
  • Current City (28) : People who also currently live in Bournemouth.
  • Home Town (148): People who grew up in Bicester, my home town.

I shall look into how Facebook categories these into close friends, acquaintances etc. 

Upon thinking about which topic my poster will be about, I have decided that I will be making a poster based around “What is your Social Network?”. For this I will look at my Facebook profile and its Friends list. 

I found the above poster on Information is Beautiful (link : http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2014/who-rules-the-social-web-2/). It displays a graphic about who rules social media. It uses a simple graphic of  a person to represent a data set to the audience, which is very simple to understand. I believe this sort of graphic would be useful in showing my data to the audience to, as it doesn’t take much to fully understand what the graphic is representing.

I also think I can use different colours to present different ideas to the audience, for example splitting my lists into categories of males and females to answer the question of how many males and how many female Facebook friends I have. I could colour these as blue (males) and pink (females), because media stereotypes these colours to each gender, so it would be easy for the audience to understand the data.

Going forward, I shall research my Facebook friends lists and create a mind map of the categories I can place my Facebook friends In and how I can represent this data on my poster. 

In the workshop we used Inkscape, a free design software to create a computer generated drawing of a Japanese Kokeshi doll. Very similarly to Adobe’s illustrator software, I used the ellipse and rectangle tools to create basic shapes. I then used the “node” tool to manipulate the individual anchor points to create my desired shape. I then used the “fill and stroke” menus to add colour to my design.

The reason why we used both Illustrator and Inkscape was to decide which software I would use in order to create my poster. Having played around with both, I feel that Inkscape would be my software of choice for this particular assignment, as it is free. so I can work on my project with my own computer without having to pay a charge, but also I personally find the software a lot easier to use than Illustrator. 

Here are a few basic shapes I created in our first workshop based around Adobe’s Illustrator software. I used the Ellipse and rectangle tool to create random shapes such as circles and squares. I then created a face using these tools, and also the layer tool to create a small background for an object. 

Development and Realisation – Introduction – Monday 17.11.14

Today, we began a new unit in the course: Development and Realisation. We had an introductory lecture which detailed what the unit would be about, what tasks we have to complete and what sort of software and skills we would be learning in workshops.  

We have been given two tasks to complete in this unit. 

Task 1: Design Analysis

The first task of the unit is to compile a blog of supporting work throughout the module reflecting initially on my ideas of communication and information design. Then, as a means towards research and planning the work as a response to the communication design A2 poster brief (task 2).

I shall be using this blog to track research, the development of my ideas and work in progress and I should clearly illustrate a progression from the start of an idea right through to the finalising of details. I should include any brainstorms, cuttings from any media, looking as and documenting existing works across a variety of media as reference, working though and refining ideas, doodles and anything relevant in the research and completion of the poster. I must include references for sources. 

I should aim to post on the blog every two days to track my research and planning and avoid describing step by step technical processes. 

Submission and deadline information: 

Submit blog URL as digital document (.doc or .pdf) as well as print to pdf copy of all pages in blog. Submit via Turn it in submission on MyBu.

DEADLINE: 12PM NOON MONDAY 12TH JANUARY 2015.

Task 2: Communication Design

For the second task of the unit, I am challenged to visually communicate an idea detailed as part of the brief of my choosing and a set of data about it as an A2 poster, in either landscape or portrait orientation.

Having looking at the brief, two ideas initially stood out to me. These were:

1. Where have you been and when? – Visually map the places you have been over the course of your life.

2. What is your social network? Visualise your Facebook social network using Facebook class-action of close friends, family and acquaintances. 

These two ideas instantly attracted me to them because I believe I could use elements of social media as part of them, which I have a real passion for. For example, with the “where have you been and when?” idea, I could use location data from services such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Apple’s location data from photos taken from my Apple products, such as my iPhone.  

The Facebook idea, again attracted me to it because it is based around Facebook, the worlds largest social networking website. I think I would enjoy learning and producing a poster about this again because I have a passion for social media. 

The emphasis however, is not on the data collection itself, so I need to make sure I don’t spend time collecting data unless it is simple and easily accessible. The audience must understand the idea and data from the poster alone and not with the use of supporting materials such as text or verbal communication. The poster must only use vector graphics primarily authored using Adobe’s illustrator software or Inkscape.

Submission and deadline information: 

Submission is made in two parts:

1. The A2 poster, submitted as  an A2 PDF copy

2. Critique (10 mins max), verbally present A2 poster.

DEADLINE: 

POSTER: 12PM NOON MONDAY 12TH JANUARY 2015

CRITIQUE: 10AM – 1PM MONDAY 12TH JANUARY 2015, CGO1 LOCATION

Here I created a Slit Scan photo using the free iOS app “Twist”. It slowly took a still photo, whilst I typed on the keyboard. The result was that the motion of my hand moving would blur in the photo due to the slow speed of the photo been taken.

Here I experimented with fast shutter speeds using a Digital SLR camera. I had the shutter speed at 1/800, F8 and had the ISO set at 12800. 

For my subject I used a bowl of flour, I had had an assistant to throw a block of cooking butter into the bowl, throwing the light flour into the air.