The concepts I will be focusing on will be the basic principle "repetition" and the design element "line."
On to Writing as Information Design. My first project was to design a logo. The purpose of this project was to 1) Demonstrate understanding of the principles of design, 2) Convey the identity of the company represented by the logo, and 3) appeal to a particular audience. I chose to design one for Purpleheart Armoury.
I created a more dynamic line that makes the eye follow the swing of the sword down and across to the name of the company. I broke up this line near the fencer's hands in order to create contrast, and to simulate moments in time. Thicker, darker lines on the fencer simulate shadow, and make it look 3-dimensional. This cannot be accomplished without contrast.
I had to limit myself to black and white, so I could not use complementary colors to create further contrast. I attempted to do this by making the swoosh line a different texture than the rest of the logo, but in my opinion, this creates too much contrast. It needs another part of the logo to me textured in the same way in order to unify the piece and make the texturing look intentional. The baseline is textured in the same way, but it does not show as much.
Next came the resume project. The purposes of this project were to 1) demonstrate understanding of the principles of information design, 2) to create categories and hierarchies of information as a direct response to a job ad, and 3) convey a sense of my own identity. I chose to tailor #1 to fit an application to the Japanese eikaiwa chain Nova, and #2 to a job opening for an Activision game tester.
In the first resume, both the real lines and implied lines of text are horizontal, thus making the direction for the line of sight. The columns are vertical,of course, but there is little to no conflicting direction outside of these standard patterns. Unfortunately, the bottom left paragraph of the "Skills" section is misaligned from the other paragraphs, thus creating unwanted contrast. I used a bright orange to make certain titles stand out, but repeated said color so as to not make it stand out so much that it is hard to focus on other information.
Without the dividing lines in between sections, there was not enough to distinguish the sections from each other—there was not anything to contrast the white space in between the sections and the white space elsewhere. If there had been enough room to make bigger space that may have worked, but by inserting these think lines, I was able to include more information. This use of contrast and line has been successful
For Resume #2, the use of line direction was much the same, except I chose to make the title portion vertical. These vertical lines to not mirror any other lines in the resume, and are of slightly differing lengths, thus drawing much attention to my name and contact information. I added a pattern that utilizes diagonal lines in the background of the resume, which added more contrast and visual interest. Since the lines were in a pattern, however, the contrast is not too jolting so as to take away attention from the lines of text. The color of this pseudo-honeycomb pattern is faint so as to blend in with the background for the same purpose. Unfortunately, there is an unintentional object of contrast in the large "H" next to the title of the first block of information. This is because the webding font I used to make the icon wasn't licensed for making PDFs. As a result, there are three visual icons that represent the themes of the sections they head, and then a giant "H" representing my previous jobs.
The purposes of the infographic were 1) to demonstrate understanding of how to present a large body of information efficiency, and 2) to demonstrate understanding of the ethics of visual rhetoric.
The only solid lines in this project were those in the "How It Works" karoshi flowchart. They vaguely relate the information with the salaryman in the background, forcing the viewer to look to and from the stages in the karoshi process. The other lines were merely implicit ones in between blocks of color and those of text alignment.
Because the images in the flowchart were so asymmetrical, and there was not a dominant weight for images to be on one side or the other of the piece, I made the text align along a center line. The title text, that is. The text about geographical areas most concerned with karoshi has an entire paragraph to the right side, which makes that particular section contrasted without a particular rhetorical reason for it. Thus, the use of lines was about half successful and half unsuccessful.
With this project, I had the liberty of using as much color as I wanted, and I used that opportunity. I took all of my colors from the images in the original flowchart images, and repeated them throughout the graphic. I made the colors with red undertones dominate, so I used a teal color, which is close to the direct opposite of most of the red colors I was using, and which was used only in tiny veins in a blood vessel image, to make a smaller section and text stand out. I also used some light yellow from blood plaque to make text stand out as well.
I would classify the contrast, achieved by both color and line, 2/3 effective.
Credits:
Created with images by Hans - "forget me not flower brunnera vergissmeinnicht" • Almi - "autumn blue sky red" • Pexels - "abstract backdrop background" • cocoparisienne - "forget me not hoverfly fly"