Final Project

We wanted to make a semester encompassing visual that demonstrated the
majority of topics we learned about this semester, such that it could
be understood by someone who did not take the class. We created a
persona of a typical Roger Williams student entering the
Communications major. Our choice of visual was a flow chart because of
its easy read and it was the easiest way to show the majority of
information without having a convoluted graphic. We used different
colors matching with the different shapes within the chart so that
questions, terminators and actions were easily distinguished.
The chart started with the choice of graphic, moving on to the
decisions of color, shape and size, finally ending with the breakdown
of Schriver’s Model. The front side of our visual represents the
thoughts of our persona, Axel. When creating our flow chart we broke
up the sections between us to gain a greater insight on what we were
graphing. Shean dealt with determining the graphical visualization,
Marybeth covered colors, shapes and sizes, and Brittany mapped out
Schriver’s Model. We decided on these three subjects because they were
key in our own processes in making our other visualizations throughout
the semester. As opposed to trying to market a broad audience, we
decided to make our target audience more succinct by creating the
persona, Axel. The front side of the flow chart represents the
thoughts of our persona in the form of a mind map. This was in the
hopes of giving our classmates an exact idea of who we are targeting
in our graphic. We all felt that the flow chart was the best way to
get the information across concisely. We also agreed on the mind map
because it was a great contrast to the rigid structure of the flow
chart.
I enjoyed working on this project, although I enjoyed it alot more once we had decided on the type of visual we'd be using. I took the choosing the graphic part of the flowchart, and subsequently made five questions that I thought would point the user to the correct visual for the data they were trying to portray. We met several times to discuss different ideas we had for how to go about making a semester encompassing visual, and at one of our later meetings MB had the great idea to put a mind map of our audience persona on the front of our graphic, which I think really helped to enhance the project as a whole.

Multivariate Display

For my Multivariate Display I decided to to tackle a subject that is very close to my heart, i.e. the holiday game market for this year's holiday season. The Holiday season in gaming is basically games that are released in November and December before the 25th of course. I decided to split the games up into the different genre's under which they fall, and of course I included all three game consoles of the most recent generation. I gave the bar graphs a bit of texture, not enough to make them distracting but just enough to add a little pop and depth to the graph itself. The dark background also serves to highlight the colors in the bars of the bar graph themselves, and I chose the stacked bar graph because it really shows the difference immediately of how many games each console has in each genre.

Storyboards

Alas I couldn't figure out how to take a screenshot on my laptop, just another indicator that I need a Mac. I took these pictures of my two storyboards, but they are obviously alot easier to see in my sketchbook. My thought process while making these storyboards was to basically get a feeling from the provided pictures and let my imagination take over from there. It yielded some...interesting results with my first storyboard going from the stock picture of the four people walking through fog or smoke prompting me to make them into the sole survivors of a zombie apocolypse. In my second storyboard I took the picture of the girl alone in the woods and turned her into a lost child, who inspired a state-wide man (or child) hunt. I also took the stock picture of the man praying and made him a shaman who mistakenly asks the forces of nature with which he communes to "consume" the girl, and as such the second storyboard finds the missing little girl in the jaws of a ferocious bear.

Tables and Graphs

games	Pre-Order Sales	1st week Sales	Total Game Sales to date
COD: MW	1.5 million	2 million	13 million
COD: WAW	2.3 million	3.6 million	11 million
COD: MW2	2.2 million	3.2 million	12.5 million
COD: BO	2.6 million	5.6 million	10 million

Phew who knew making a chart into a table in the newest version of Excel was a million times harder than it was back in the 08 version? That was unbelievable like I'm supposed to know how to insert legit computer language, thank god the powerpoint version was a thousand times easier and actually seemed like it wanted you to be able to make a graph out of your data. I chose to make a table first then a bar graph of the sales of the four most recent games in the Call of Duty franchise. It was a little tricky to find the numbers because some would vary by site and at times I had to add up the pre-order sales from each individual system. It should also be noted that the most recent game COD: BO or Call of Duty Black Ops has only been out since November 9th of this year so the fact that it has sold ten million copies so far is pretty amazing. I started by making a graph in my sketchpad just so I could get my rows and columns down before I started playing around with the different computer systems and the visual graph options in them. The table is one of the many table options in the excel program and I liked this one for its simplicity, it's easy to read and right to the point. I wanted to make a bar graph because I thought it would best display the three columns of data for each game if they were side by side by side. Unfortunately I wasn't able to figure out how to put a label on the y-axis of the graph in powerpoint to make it clear that the numbers are in the millions, but when the graph is coupled with the chart it makes sense and I really don't think anyone would assume these huge game titles had only sold 13 copies to date at most. Its also easy to see in my graph how the popularity of pre-ordering games has grown in the subsequent years after the first Modern Warfare title was realeased. I wanted to put the full names of the games on the graph but spatially that just wouldn't have worked.

Flowcharts

Graphic Paper

My first order of business when looking to improve this graphic was to get the right shapes around the questions and terminators, as the original graphic had squares around terminators and a rectangle around the starting point for the graphic. I also changed the circles around the yes and no options to rectangles as corresponds with the Standard Flow Chart Symbols and their Usage. I also put arrows in along the lines from symbol to symbol to give a better sense of the flow of control. I tried to make the graphic itself more vertical because I thought it would lessen the cognitive load if the person’s eye could travel basically just up and down the page to get the graphic’s content without having to move much on the horizontal axis. I made all the terminators look the same by first putting them in similar looking circles and by having the “Buy A” line by itself above the system the graphic was telling the viewer to buy. I think this gives the terminators a similar look so even at a quick glance one can see the options they will eventually end up at. My next goal was to add some color to the sparse black and white original graphic, and I kept cognitive load in mind when adding color. I put hard outlines around my terminators and I even added some yellow to my starting point because yellow is the first color we see so it should draw the viewers eye to the top and the correct starting point. I then put green outlines around the yes decision options and red outlines around the no decision options as a way for the viewer to jump right over the text in those symbols by thinking green means positive like the go in a stoplight and red means negative or the no of a stoplight. I also put color inside the terminators, red for Nintendo because red will always be associated with Mario a staple of Nintendo. I chose a light green for the Xbox 360 because that’s the very color they use in their advertising and it is the green of the power indicator on the system itself. I chose blue for the PS3 because again it is the color used in the companies advertisements. I used orange for the PC because one of the PC’s biggest franchises was Half Life which had orange lettering themes, and orange didn’t conflict or clash with any of the other colors I’d used around it. I put hard black outlines around the questions to solidify them and thick black arrows on the connecting lines.

Spaghetti Dinner