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 ...