Final Take-Home Exam - Illustrator portion due Monday, December 10, 5:00 PM

(I won't accept late submissions so if you know yourself to be someone who struggles to turn things in on time, tell yourself it's due at noon, if need be and consider turning in an early version just in case something happens and you can't turn in a later version)

Don't hesitate to email me with questions or ask for help - I want this to be a chance for you to learn, not just a way to test what you've already learned.

As with the other take-home exams, you will be emulating a professional design

The story behind why I have you do this...

I took a design course called "Information Design" several years ago. The image you see below is the first page of the design I created in that course. The teacher was kind enough to let me in, though everyone else in the class was in their second or third year of the design program. I scrambled to keep up and felt like my designs looked simplistic and childish next to theirs despite the fact that I was working really hard. Their designs were incredibly sophisticated - they spent hours on minute details, would experiment with dramatically different strategies and would start over entirely if they realized a strategy they were using wasn't effective, even if they had spent hours on it. It gave me a great deal of respect for designers. After the first few weeks, every class period consisted of the entire group gathering around a wall where half of the class had posted their work, and having the students take turns describing their work and hearing our comments about what we saw. Many of the comments were about details like alignment or color choices.



It was hard for me to figure out how to make my design look more sophisticated, so I spent time looking at professional designs, thinking about what they were doing that I wasn't. Eventually I found one design that had a style I really liked and that felt appropriate for my information. I decided to try to copy that style. So I did what I'm having you all do - I used the same sizes and styles of text and the same types of arrangement of elements on the page etc. Since my information was different, I had to figure out how to adapt the styles to fit my information. The final result, while still far from perfect, was much better than anything I could have come up with on my own and I learned a lot about what the designer was doing - much more than I had noticed just by looking at it. I've since used this strategy over and over again, and I feel that I learn more than way than when I generate designs from scratch (though I do that too, of course).

I realize that you don't have the benefit of the experience I had - as far as I know, you haven't had a chance to see how much intense work it takes to produce a polished visual design and how hard designers struggle to address dilemmas like how to create unity and balance and clarity and hierarchy etc. all at the same time.

When I teach this class, I'm very aware that there are an enormous number of technical and creative skills that go into producing effective designs, and that one quarter is only enough time to scratch the surface. My challenge is to figure out how to scratch that surface in a way that will give you a good foundation to continue learning. I've decided that a solid set of technical skills is crucial because to learn, you need to practice producing visuals, and you can't practice producing visuals if you don't have the technical skills. I've also decided that it's unreasonable expect you to develop a sophisticated set of design skills in one quarter, but it is realistic for you to gain an appreciation of the fact that there are principles out there, and to learn the skill of emulating the pros in order to learn from them.

FILE TO download - Feel free to continue working with your existing file, or get a fresh start with this version of the file which I've cleaned up to make sure there is nothing that will get in the way (e.g. groups or route lines that are in segments). (Apologies for taking out the street names - I really appreciated the effort some of you took to include them...unfortunately, it got complicated to include them and too many routes didn't have them so we didn't have enough consistency).

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Read through all of the instructions for both the Illustrator and Flash portions first so you have a sense of the entire scope before diving in.

2. Create and submit a plan (to Canvas any time before Monday, Dec 3 at 5:30)

To help you get on the right track, I want you to come up with a plan and pass it by me. You will probably end up modifying your idea as you work on it, which is fine, but this will at least ensure that you have a reasonable focus to work from. You can submit it any time before Monday (December 3) at 5:30 and I'll try to give you feedback within a few hours.

Your plan should have two components:

The message that you will convey visually

(The description of your message should include "the buses that serve the UW directly")

Examples:

• "This will be a map for parents of small children who work or go to school at the UW. It shows which daycare facilities can be reached by buses that serve the UW directly (i.e. don't require a transfer), and includes how long it takes to get there and how frequently the buses run"



• "This will be a map that shows how frequently buses that serve the UW directly run and when they run (weekdays, weekends, night-time). It will give UW commuters a sense of how easily they can get to other locations from the UW campus without a car. It's particularly useful for students who live close to or on campus and want to know whether they'll be able to live without a car"

It's fine if your message is the same as someone else's. You're even welcome to use these ideas if you don't don't feel good about the one you've been working on. I'm not worried about originality of the core idea - every execution will be different.

What interactivity do you envision?

Read through the Flash portion of the exam and decide what interactivity you envision. Though you won't necessarily be implementing this interactivity with your Illustrator design, you want your illustrator design to support the interactivity (in other words, if your interactivity allows you to see different views, make each of those views in Illustrator. If your interactivity calls for a pop-up info box, include the design of that box in Illustrator).

2. Find a design to emulate

It wouldn't hurt to include the design you want to emulate in your plan, but that isn't required.

This time it's up to you to decide which professional design to emulate. Feel free to use one of the designs from a previous exam (New Zealand Sheep, London Olympics, Toxic Spills or Afghanistan War), or from the labs (waterborne diseases, National Park Service Maps, media diet, job forecast choropleth map), one of the ones listed as a "visual of the week" or one you find on your own (if you are unsure whether a design is appropriate for this purpose, feel free to ask me). In general any professionally created infographic will probably work - just make sure it isn't too complicated - I very carefully selected designs that were relatively easy to emulate. It's easiest to emulate a design that has similar elements (e.g. since your design will feature the bus map, it will be easier to emulate a design which has a map, but not absolutely necessary - remember you created maps for the first exam even though neither the New Zealand Sheep nor the London Olympics had a map).

3. Create your bus route design

DO YOU NEED TO INCLUDE ALL OF THE ROUTES IN THE DESIGN?

In general, my assumption is that your design concept should inculde all of the routes, but if it implementing your design concept involves creating an elaborate display for each route, it's fine if you focus on just enough routes to get the concept across. (If in doubt, feel free to check with me).

HOW CLOSELY DO YOU NEED TO EMULATE THE PROFESSIONAL DESIGN?

As closely as you possibly can. Try really hard to emulate it (even if it means doing something that seems less interesting or visually appealing than another idea you have - hopefully you won't have to do that too much since you've presumably chosen a design that you like). You'll undoubtedly have to depart from the design in some ways, but don't do so lightly - convince yourself as well as me that you've made a concerted effort to stick to it but have a reason to vary that is compelling.

INCLUDE COMMENTS, OF COURSE

You will probably want to analyze the professional designs in order to do this assignment, but all I need to see this time, is your thorough anaysis of your own design (which should be full of references to the professional design)

Here again are the questions to answer (feel free to expand on this):

Initial impressions:

What do you like about the visual presentation? What do you dislike about it? If you saw this presentation on the web or in a newspaper, would it attract your attention and make you interested in reading it? Why/why not?

Visual strategies:

How does it create visual hierarchy? (How does it suggest what order view the information in?)

How does this help you get the message/hinder you from getting the message? (In order to answer this question and future questions stop for a minute and ask what overall message you think the creator is trying to covney)

How does it create layering? (Is it easy to scan and spot all similar elements or do they just seem randomly jumbled together?)

How does this help you get the message/hinder you from getting the message?

How does it use color? (encode, evoke, highlight, set at tone)

How does this help you get the message/hinder you from getting the message?

How does it use text? (To label, to annotate, to add precision? How are type sizes/styles and fonts used?)

How does this help you get the message/hinder you from getting the message?

Is there unity? Is there variety? How are they created?

What do you think about the representation strategies? (e.g. the use of a map or bar chart or pie chart etc..)

How does this help you get the message/hinder you from getting the message?

How are things arranged on the page? Are elements aligned with each other?

How does this help you get the message/hinder you from getting the message?

WHAT DOES THE FINAL PRODUCT NEED TO INCLUDE?

1. Your design in Illustrator
2. Your analysis of your design (put your comments in their own artboard so they'll be preserved when you save your Illustrator file as a pdf document)
3. A copy of the design you're emulating if it's one you found yourself

Save the file as a pdf (several of you have done this which I've appreciated because then, if you use fonts I don't have on my computer, I'll be able to see them as you intended).

Be sure that all of your work is on arbaords and be sure to save all artboards when you save as a pdf file:

Final Illustrator product: Design.pdf (the due date is December 10, 5:00PM)

Plan (by Monday at 5:30)