Facebook
Stephen Johnson 2011
Playing on words from the old saying “You cant judge a book by its cover”, this is a social commentary of the culture of Facebook; alter egos. A static profile picture can rarely tell you the story of the real person, more how they want to be perceived to the world as.
“Beach?”
Stephen Johnson 2011
As a bi-monthly event, “This is” sets a creative brief: a themed challenge for artists and designers. Successful entries are printed, framed and exhibited in the venue 60 Million Postcards. For this exhibition, the theme was “Start of Summer”.
For this theme I chose to focus on the beach. In particular, the poster proposes the optimistic question of wanting to go to the beach. The image within the text and colour filters capture the warmth of the beach and the coolness of water. It will be available to buy online shortly.
In April I was given a brief to design a poster for a local music venue. My objective was create was something minimalistic, but attention grabbing. The poster is clean and functional; headlining bands clear by typographic hierarchy and an engaging visual.
“Blow”
Stephen Johnson 2011
Every month “This is” sets a creative brief: a themed challenge for artists and designers. Successful entries are printed, framed and exhibited in the venue 60 Million Postcards. For this month, the theme was “Up in the Air”: from defying gravity to a moment in the sky.
For this brief, I chose to communicate the movement of bubbles blowing in the sky. The final image is bold and rich in colour to go with the time of summer. The textured bubbles give the image a sense of depth; floating away in the blue sky.
Fallen Cedar by Stephen Johnson
In conjunction with Massey University New Zealand, everyone had to select a recent local news story and express it typographically. These postcards would then be exchanged with those from New Zealand.
Simplicity and suggestion was the approach I took; altering the typography slightly to tell the story. The fallen ‘r’ takes the form of a part of the fallen cedar whilst guiding to the back story.
An inspirational outlook to life. The ability for change rests within ourselves.
In this self directed project I did a few years ago I used blackboard and chalk to create an animated alphabet. Each letter was photographed from grids, outlines to solids. These were then layered and made into motion. Feel free to share them.
Final Design – 100 Fallen Soldiers (click to open PDF)
Stephen Johnson 2010
Brief
Create a system that shows relationships between information. The content for this is up to you. Visualise data/statistics and map the relevant relationships between the information/
objects/events.
My design objective for this project was to compare meaningful and topical data. Order and simple visualisation of information was the approach I wanted to take to communicate easily. Whilst I changed my idea many times throughout the project, it was not without reason. All of my ideas were linked by the humanistic quality; influences on human lives. The approach I took with my final idea, “Fallen Soldiers” was to communicate the soldiers not as numbers and times, but as people and ages. This was something the audience could easily relate to, making it more relative and hard-hitting. In the broader context it raises questions on why we are still in Afghanistan and if it is still worth losing our young soldier’s lives over.
My research was a combination of online and books. Starting with “The Beauty of Data Visualisation” by David McCanless was helpful to see how information can tell a story. To visualise the fallen soldiers data, I had to view the records of every soldier on the Ministry of Defence online and record their name, photo and how they died.
Idea Generation – Visualising Data
Initial Idea 1 – Weather Sky Overview
Initial Idea 2 – Maleria Worldwide
Initial Idea 3 – Oil in Relation to Conflicts
Initial Idea 4 – Breakfast
Development – Visualising Maleria deaths by mosquito scale
Testing – Mock-up of previous idea using real imagery
Development – Alternative ways of conveying data. Blood.
Testing – Mock-up of previous idea using real imagery
Analysis – Usefulness of data. Objective.
Statistics found on the World Health Organisation were mainly estimates and did not give clear figures. The subject had no suprises and it would be a predicatable outcome; underdeveloped countries with high maleria rates, poor health and so on. I took the decision to focus on a different idea with something more unexpected.
New Idea – Water Donation relative to price.
After viewing the Red Cross website I learnt the volume of water they could donate overseas for every £5 donated. From this I worked out how much volume of water normal products such as a morning coffee would be worth.
Development – Working out an objective.
Visualisation – Amount spent vs Relative worth of water
Alternative Visual – Product bought vs Relative water
The eventual problem with this idea was that I was creating data from existing statistics so it slowed down working. The water relativeness data was taken from the Red Cross, meaning it was not an accurate representation for donating as a whole and tied my idea to that charity. Comparing products to water relativeness would have raised copyright issues using product placement. Whilst the idea was interesting, it became more of an analogy rather than statistics telling a story. The idea was dropped.
New Idea – Fallen Soldiers 2010
Development – Focus on representing age.
Instead of time of death driving the system, age at death was chosen to communicate the greater picture of how young fallen soldiers are. This was not going to be about numbers and time, but about names, faces and ages. This would be something the user could easily identify with.
Development – Age + How the soldiers died
The faces in greyscale were much stronger in communicating past life and remembrance than coloured pictures which suggested they were still alive. Arranging the photos centrally by age created an alternative visual, but it was less effective than the previous of showing proportion and range. A colour overlay system was used to explain how each soldier died. The grid structure was less dynamic than the first so i returned to the previous structure.
Mock up & Testing – Map data added
The feedback from the pin-up was that the connecting lines were too complicated and made reading the data too hard. The faces of each soldier were noticably the most shocking part and made the data relative to each young person viewing it. The decision would be to emphasise on the faces by making the design format bigger.
Development – Emphasising images. Alternative structure.
Final DesignFinal Design – 100 Fallen Soldiers. (Click to view PDF)
Evaluation
The visualisation of data is simple. Using faces of fallen soldiers instantly made the statistic from a number to a face the user could recognise; a real person and not a number. The main grid of photographs is a hard-hitting image to grab attention. The feedback from the pin-up was that the faces were the most striking and haunting so I chose to emphasise these by scale. Using smaller scale grids on the right side, the system uses cross-referencing to find detailed information on the cause of death and age at death.
The decision was taken to remove the previous colour coded system of outlines because they distracted too much from the faces and took away emphasis. The coloured outlines were too heavy and suffocated the images. In keeping with the theme of the fallen, the greyscale colours are well suited to the darkness of death; drained of colour/life.
Every month “This is” sets a creative brief: a themed challenge for artists and designers. successful entries are printed, framed and exhibited in the venue 60 Million Postcards. For this month, the theme was Nautical Nonsense: an eclectic collection of maritime inspired designs.
For this brief, I wanted something organic for the theme of maritime. I created an abstract drawing of a fish/drop of water to begin with. I had taken photographs of a surfing friend (Tory Cunningham) during the summer and wanted to include the movement of surf in the design. The final piece is a fragmented collage of surf inspired photographs, creating a three-dimensional shape. I believe it has the depth and movement I aimed for, whilst the red injects warmth into it. Resembling a sun reflecting on the sea.
