After reading some articles and watching Dr. Glazewski's online lecture on imaginary and representation, I found the topic of this week "mapping, representing, and organizing information"can be one of the most critical issues that instructional designers need to carefully deal with during their design process. Also, information representation and organization are especially important to my inforgraphic design project because I believe that the fundamental and vital principle in infographic design is to appropriately represent and convey information to your audience. Therefore, I think this is the essential topic for me to learn in this class.
In Dr. Glazewski's screencast, I realized that there are no universal rules to follow for mapping, representing, and organizing information in your design. All decisions made by instructional designers on different kinds of representation in their design will have to based on their intention and consideration, including who their audience is, what the content is, in what context the design will be shown, and what their constraints are. However, in one of the reading of this week, Jones, Pierce, and Hunter (1988) stated that "a fundamental rule in constructing graphic representations is that the structure of the graphic should reflect the structure of the text it represents." (p.21). When I started thinking about my infographic design, I feel it is not an easy, simple work to construct and organize the representations covered with all information I want to show in my infographic design all at once at the beginning. Although the massive thoughts and information made me not know where to start at first, I tried to do the mapping and planning by breaking down and categorizing all my thoughts. My thoughts and some decisions I made are showed as follows:
Infographic topic: "Why Teaching Technology Lab (TTL)?"
Target audience: W200 students
Purpose: The main purpose is to show W200 students that the TTL is a place where they can access different kinds of service and resources from the TTL Staff. Also, this infographic can also be used as an advertisement.
Color & Font: IU Red will be the main theme. Will try bright colors to highlight main services, so that my audience can get the idea of what they can be helped from the TTL Staff within a few seconds. Normally, people have an impression that computer labs are places you serve yourself and gives people the feeling of unwelcoming and unfriendly. Therefore, trying some brighter color with not-so-serious fonts might be able to give W200 students a better impression on the TTL.
Content: In terms of the content, I would like to use some icons that is simple enough for W200 students to easily understand what different kinds of services and resources they can get from the TTL. For example, an icon of printer and scanner should be clear enough for them to know they can print and scan in the TTL. Also, some graphs will be displayed along with statistic numbers to show the percentage of people who had visited the TTL are satisfied with the service. Previous W200 students' purpose of visit will be shown as well. In order to attract W200 students' attention, there will not have long and descriptive texts on the infographic, but key words and short sentences instead.
These are the thoughts and decisions I have so far. I believe that some detail elements will need to be considered during the actual design/drawing process.
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In Dr. Glazewski's screencast, I realized that there are no universal rules to follow for mapping, representing, and organizing information in your design. All decisions made by instructional designers on different kinds of representation in their design will have to based on their intention and consideration, including who their audience is, what the content is, in what context the design will be shown, and what their constraints are. However, in one of the reading of this week, Jones, Pierce, and Hunter (1988) stated that "a fundamental rule in constructing graphic representations is that the structure of the graphic should reflect the structure of the text it represents." (p.21). When I started thinking about my infographic design, I feel it is not an easy, simple work to construct and organize the representations covered with all information I want to show in my infographic design all at once at the beginning. Although the massive thoughts and information made me not know where to start at first, I tried to do the mapping and planning by breaking down and categorizing all my thoughts. My thoughts and some decisions I made are showed as follows:
Infographic topic: "Why Teaching Technology Lab (TTL)?"
Target audience: W200 students
Purpose: The main purpose is to show W200 students that the TTL is a place where they can access different kinds of service and resources from the TTL Staff. Also, this infographic can also be used as an advertisement.
Color & Font: IU Red will be the main theme. Will try bright colors to highlight main services, so that my audience can get the idea of what they can be helped from the TTL Staff within a few seconds. Normally, people have an impression that computer labs are places you serve yourself and gives people the feeling of unwelcoming and unfriendly. Therefore, trying some brighter color with not-so-serious fonts might be able to give W200 students a better impression on the TTL.
Content: In terms of the content, I would like to use some icons that is simple enough for W200 students to easily understand what different kinds of services and resources they can get from the TTL. For example, an icon of printer and scanner should be clear enough for them to know they can print and scan in the TTL. Also, some graphs will be displayed along with statistic numbers to show the percentage of people who had visited the TTL are satisfied with the service. Previous W200 students' purpose of visit will be shown as well. In order to attract W200 students' attention, there will not have long and descriptive texts on the infographic, but key words and short sentences instead.
These are the thoughts and decisions I have so far. I believe that some detail elements will need to be considered during the actual design/drawing process.
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| Week 4 - Tagxedo |
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Hi Janet:
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the signature picture of your post is done by you or automatically synthesized?
I agree there's no common rules of presentation to follow.But I still believe the existence of some basic principles or some ethics, properly. But you did a great job to explain the point based on what you learnt.
It is a kind of good presentation to use some example to present. You used your project to illustrate the skills, concerns of presentation in a practical view.Hope to see your infographic soon.
Hi Martin,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. The pictures in the end of every post were created by Tagxedo. You should try it sometimes. It's fun.