My Information Design Journey

 For our final blog post we were tasked with looking at accessibility through the lens of our blogging experience. Accessibility is an area I didn't have much experience with prior to this class, and really am only beginning to understand how large of a topic it truly is. A quick Google search for the definition of accessibility returns: The quality of being able to be reached or entered The quality of being easy to obtain or use The quality of being easily understood or appreciated The quality of being easily reached, entered, or used by people who have a disability In all of these definitions the key section is the word: quality. Accessibility is a quality of our media, and concerns the idea of our media being easy to reach, use, understand, and accommodate a variety of people with different needs. As a content creator, these are vital parts of our success as if we fail on any of them we cannot reach the highest volume of consumers to interact with our product.  When I was t...

  Image by  Walter Knerr  from  Pixabay   For this weeks blog we were asked to select an infographic to analyze, and I decided to take a look at road signs. We all use these nearly everyday to maintain safety while traveling and to find our way from a to b. Road signs are interesting in their scale, and by that I mean how broadly they are used. For example, you can find the octagonal stop sign used in the United States, Europe, Iran, China and many other countries with very little significant variation (Stop Sign, 2023). The ubiquitous nature of road sign usage makes them effective, as when we learn to travel we learn a set of symbols and apply that knowledge nearly everywhere we go. Road signs also display unity of form. When the sign programs were developed they were clearly designed to "...be unified in appearance to enhance the sign program's cohesiveness and effectiveness (Calori and Vanden-Eynden, pg. 202)." This design is explained very well by Autoeurope...

 For this assignments post we were asked to talk about an information design process. One of the readings we looked at was Signage and Wayfinding Design: A Complete Guide to Creating Environmental Graphic Design Systems.  Authors Calori and Venden-Eynden describe design activity as a problem-solving process and breakdown the design process into a series of steps: Assess the client's problem Apply creative skills Synthesize a solution Communicate the solution to the producer Oversee production of the solution Evaluate effectiveness of the finished product They go on to to say that while design process is evolutionary and steps may overlap or need to be repeated the goal is to move from the beginning to the end more or less in order (Calori and Vanden-Eynden, pg. 21). While each step has its own significance, this post is going to focus on the first step - Assess the client's problem, or as we will say Ask (I really wish I could get that light in the picture to come on when you ...

 Our topic for this blog post was to look at the pros and cons of an information design theory, one different from what we wrote about for the group discussion. In the group forum I wrote about Nathan Shedroff's idea of meaning in design strategy[1]. In his Ted Talk, Nathan goes over five "layers" of meaning going from least to most importance. The idea of looking closely at your audience and designing with an eye towards what is important to them, what is meaningful to them, is something I can relate to. It just makes sense to me that if you are going to create something you want people to engage with you should try to understand something about those people. When I started thinking about this post I had a hard time framing it in my mind. Historically I haven't liked these pros and cons assignments and information design is a topic that muddies the water even further. When I look at some of the theories we have read about I don't see theories, I see tools.  Image...

  Why did the chicken cross the road? Image by thewebprincess [4] Obviously we can't know for sure why our aspiring poultry pioneer began such a harrying journey across the terrifying asphalt expanse, but it would not be out of the realm of possibility to say that they may have seen something on the other side they were interested in or something behind they were trying to get away from. Something likely interacted with them visually to drive our heroic adventurer to action. Hello everyone, my name is David and welcome to My Information Design Journey. The main reason I am starting this blog because of an assignment. This is my last semester in college pursuing a bachelors in manufacturing management, and I had some electives to fill. I spent some time looking at courses and found a course on information design. The description sounded like a good fit for what I was trying to do, data-driven manufacturing insights and communication. One of the assignments is to create a blog, so he...