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.