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.