Assignment 2: Infographics

Posted by ilo2o on 05/19/2010 · 1 Comment 

Today we had a very interesting lecture held by Mrs Apituley, an information designer working at Mijksenaar. What she told us can be very useful for our assignment, she introduced the world of infographics to us. Showing many classical examples of the last century and examples of her firm, was inspiring. We found a lot of examples online which are connected with maps as well, going mostly with the restrictions we got

This one shows how to present a design approach “mapwise”

This one works a lot with colours and icons, it doesn’t use a key and fits our limitations with that

This one seems to fit our assignment a bit more, showing a part of a city, 2,5 dimensional houses on a plain ground

This one is way too crowded to be understandable for people, but that’s part of the message it communicates…

We also thought about icons that present the stops on the map best. Like Mrs. Apituley from Mijksenaar has shown in the lecture, there are icons that are more and icons that are less understandable. Which assoziatons do people have when seeing certain symbols? For example with the symbol for shopping, our first idea was to take shopping bags as shown in the post from 05/19/2010. These didn’t seem to be convincing enough, so we took cloth hangers into consideration. But they stand more for a wardrobe and not for shopping.

A shopping trolley is very popular, but not suitable for shopping in a city, more for a supermarket or a webshop.  It was really hard to find a suitable symbol!

In the end, we decided to take a (maybe a bit sexistic but still clear) symbol of a woman, carrying two shopping bags. Further research with nine participants had shown that this is understandable and recognizable as a symbol for places where one can go shopping. As you will see in our concept, we decided to vary between a 2d and a 3d shape, but explanations for that will follow later on!

For the other icons we also did some trials in illustrator before deciding for the ones we will take for the concept for the user test. These examples are some of our trials for the museum icon.

A shopping trolley is very popular, but not suitable for shopping in a city, more for a supermarket or a webshop.  It was really hard to find a suitable symbol! In the end, we decided to take the (maybe a bit sexistic but still clear) symbol of a woman, carrying two shopping bags. Further research with nine participants had shown that this is understandable and recognizable as a symbol for places where one can go shopping. As you will see in our concept, we decided to vary between a 2d and a 3d shape, but explanations for that will follow later on!

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