DECO2200 - Graphic Design
PROJECT: Just The Facts
YEAR: 2021
DECO2200 was created as a way to teach us the technical skills behind graphic design, including the concepts of colour, typography, layout, contrast and display mediums to help develop my skills in creating professional and clear design choices. the course also taught me the technical skills needed to use Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, including how to alter settings for both digital and printed displays.
The course had two major assignments, the first being called “Just The Facts”. Throughout the semester, we were expected to design three mini infographics using Adobe Illustrator. These infographics needed to communicate a fact we had selected from three different fact pools with a different overall theme. We were tasked with representing these facts in a way that quick comprehensible at a glance.
Fact Pool 1 focused on equality, where we had to make the fact more relatable to the audience by equating it to something they might be more familiar with. The fact I used was “36 000: the number of bricks the LEGO factory produces every minute.” For this fact, I decided first to make the fact more simple by converting the number of brick to a rough weight and then using that to compare it to familiar objects like actual house bricks and an average man.
Fact Pool 2 focused on proportions. Each fact was presented as a fraction or percentage of some whole and we were tasked with visually representing the fact in a way that would enable the reader to quickly understand the scale of the fact. My face for this was “3/10 - the portion of Americans who think there will be an apocalyptic disaster in their lifetime.” I simplified the fact to make it more understandable and also played into a bit of humor by portraying the apocalypse ready people as the sane ones.
Fact Pool 3 focused on nested facts. Here we were given two facts that related to each other, with the challenge being to present the two facts in a way that clearly communicated the relationship to the audience. My two facts were “€15 million: the value of the largest model village in the world, Miniature Wunderland, in 2015.” and “€3.5million: The cost of building the 150m^2 model airport, Knuffingen Airport within the model village.” First thing I did was converted the currency to AUD seeing as my audience was Australian. I decided to represent the two facts as a proportion seeing as the airport was part of the village’s total cost. I represented this as a percentage (~23%) and visually represented this by having the airport take up about 23% of the whole infographic.
PROJECT: Infographic
The final assignment for this course was the infographic, an A2 poster was we had to create that would visually represent complex and often nested information. We were given almost full creative liberty in the theme, the information we used and how we would represent it as long as the poster met the brief. We then also had to demonstrate our knowledge of designing for print mediums by printing the poster and presenting it in class. We were graded on our ability to represent the complex data as well as applying the technical skills that we were taught.
For my infographic, I decided to represent the evolution of personal computing by highlighting key events and changes that occurred between 1974 (the release of the IBM personal computer) and 2020/21 (modern day when I made the poster). The centerpiece of the poster is the timeline of events, which visually represents when events occur in the time period, how many events the poster is referencing and which company the event is related to. I split up the events by company, and included major tech corporations like Intel, AMD, Microsoft and Apple as well as including some miscellaneous facts and others that included multiple companies at the same time. Graphs were used to help show the change in trends of the tech industry as a whole and icons were used to help the reader have a brief understanding of what the fact relates to.
