The main highlight of my first week in Game Art Design was the return of something I'd hoped to be done with: making infographics. It was one of the first tests of my design skills when I began Sci Vis, so it seems fitting that it would be the first test of how many of those skills I'd retained, and how much I had improved. My answer to both of those questions is "a lot." I decided to do my blog post about designing infographics for a couple reasons. One of these was that we didn't do much else in the first week back from summer break. Another reason is that, as I said before, I'd hoped that I was finally done making infographics. Coming back to the new school year to find that no, I wasn't at all done, made me realize something: No matter how much I dislike infographics, there's no escaping them. They're a simple and effective way to present information and get a message across, and are therefore going to be an important tool if I do (or don't) pursue game design as a career. It was something I never really felt I'd mastered completely, and I've still got work to do. But through research and personal experience, I've learned some things. Infographics are meant to be visual; it's got "graphic" in the name. Graphics catch people's eye and are more memorable. I've heard heard this over and over again, but I yet I still struggle with it. But I know that I should avoid including huge chunks of text, because people aren't to read or remember it. According to one article I read, humans only recall 20% of what they read. I don't think people are going to be remembering much from infographics... Another thing I learned was to have a clear flow, which I recently found some strategies for. It was said that the text in last week's infographic seemed to have been thrown randomly across the screen, and it was a pretty accurate observation. I was mostly concerned with trying to fit in all the different pieces in a manner that was neither cluttered nor full of white space, and I didn't give much thought to the fact that it ended up looking like a big blob of words and pictures. However, it wasn't all bad. The body half of the infographic was significantly more organized than the top, and once I was notified that the top half looked a bit like word-vomit, I numbered the different text chunks and added a subtitle about them to organize them into their own section. I said before that I was concerned about white space. I felt like there was too much of it. However, once I made the text larger, everything felt cramped. Turns out I should have kept it, as it would have the various pieces of the infographic stand out more. It also would have kept the whole thing looking considerably less like word-vomit. This article has a comparison of just how much of a difference white space can make. The white space dilemma also plays into the facts that a) I had a lot of text and b) I didn't start off with much idea how I was going to make one thing flow into the next. If I had considered that, it might not have been as big a problem. A least I was fairly on track with wanting to keep spacing even. So, to summarize:
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Of all the sensors on the TI SensorTag, I think the most interesting is the barometric pressure sensor. It measures the pressure of the atmosphere's weight. I personally think it's interesting to know how much the air is weighing on you. One way to use the sensor for an on-campus experiment would be to take readings at on different stories of a building to see if there's a measurable difference. To make the differences in the data more obvious, the readings would be put into a spreadsheet and averaged for each floor, then put into a column chart.
Here's an infographic I made about sensors: As a student, data visualization is important to me both when researching and presenting. When I'm researching for a project or paper, it saves me a lot of time if there's a chart or graph. I don't have to look through the entire paper just to find the statistics. This is also the case with presentations. Chances are, people would rather come look at a chart rather than a big chunk of text. In addition, statistics are harder to process and understand if there's only raw data, but visualization makes it a lot easier to make an impact.
If I was to use data visualization to make a change to the school, I would try to get recess implemented at DSA. I would need to do an experiment on how effectively students function with and without leisure time. I'd put the results of both groups on the same graph to emphasize the difference, and if it was a big enough difference, hopefully it would be taken into consideration. |
AuthorI'm moving on to my 4th (and final) year as a Game Art & Design student at Durham School of the Arts. I'd like to call myself an artist, but I'm a programmer at heart. Archives
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