Information Design // Final Project

INFORMATION DESIGN // FINAL PROJECT

05/01/21 -  / Week 1 - Week 7

Ibrahim Fazal Ahmad / 0337423

Information Design / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylors University 

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INSTRUCTIONS 

 

WEEK 1 (05/01/21)

For our first class, we were briefed on our final project and asked to form groups of 4-5 members. My group and I discussed our ideas for the topic, being "disinformation". An example being anti-maskers of anti-vaxxers. Filia suggested that we look into the Blue Whale Challenge. A more broad term for it would be social media hoaxes. We all agreed upon the idea and did some research and began to prepare for our presentation on Friday. 

WEEK 1 (08/01/21)

For our lecture portion, Miss Anis just went over the assignments and tasks once more for any newcomers. After which we had a little progress check on our Exercise 1. 

Here is my group's presentation on Social Media Hoaxes 

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Figure 1: Final Project Proposal.

WEEK 2 (15/01/21)

For today's class, we showed Mr Shamsul our script for the video. Aisyah will be the VO for our project as recommended by Mr Shamsul last week. We were advised to possibly cut the script down as it was too long. Which was correct, as when Aisyah tried recording on her own it went up to 5 minutes.

Here is the finalised script separated by each act: 

Figure 1.1: Final Project Script and 5W1H

WEEK 3 (22/01/21)

For this week, we have to present our storyboards. Each member of my group took one act each and we drew the storyboards individually. We also chose the colour schemes and visual styles together, as the leader I wanted to try and keep the workload and decision making as equal as possible. 

Figure 1.2: Storyboard

Figure 1.3: My section of the storyboard

WEEK 4 (29/01/21)

For this week, we had to show our animatic. Each person animated their individual section as well. Here is the final animatic: 

Figure 1.4: Animatic

Now we have distributed the work. I will be doing all the finalised sketches based on the animatic to keep the animation consistent. Everyone else will do the illustrations. Jocelin and Meiling taking charge in the illustrations for the most part. Along with Safanah, Filia and Aisyah doing the animations and I will do the last check and add the sound effects. 

WEEK 5 (02/02/21)

Now we have move onto illustrating the assets. I am doing all the sketches and sending them to my group members to illustrate properly. Meiling took illustrating the characters specifically to keep them consistent. Here is the sketches below:

Figure 1.5: Sketched assets

WEEK 6 (09/02/21)

Once the sketches were done, my group members had done the illustrations. They are all now complete and we can move onto the animation section. My group members have done an amazing job in capturing the style well and I was ecstatic with the outcome of the final illustrations and excited to see how all of this will come together in the end. 

Figure 1.6: Illustrated Assets

WEEK 7 (16/02/21)

The animation has now been completed, I then compiled the video in Adobe Premiere and added some sound effects. Safanah animated Act 1/2, Filia did Act 3/4, Aisyah did Act 5 and I did Act 6. Act 6 was rather simple so I took it on since Act 5 was the longest section of the whole video. Here is the final video:

Figure 1.7: Final video

I am very happy with this video, my group members were all amazing and did a fantastic job on this video. Everyone worked really hard and it all went smooth sailing the entire way. To any group member stalking my blog, good job guys!! You did really well :) 

FEEDBACK

Week 1: Good presentation, we can move onto creating our storyboard for the video. 

Week 2: Script seems a little too long, try cutting it down and test out how long the recording would be.

Week 3:The storyboard is great, think about the transitions between the different acts. Other than that is really well done and we can move on creating our animatic.

Week 4: The animatic is good, move on cleaning up the characters and having a more consistent visual style, along with developing backgrounds and such. 

Week 5: The sketches all look nice and consistent. The colours are a little too dark in the background which makes the characters clothes hard to see, try to tone it down.

Week 6: All the characters look good and well crafted. Continue with what we are doing. 

Week 7: - 

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REFLECTION:

Experience: My experiences this semester were all very fun. I walked into this class expecting a rather boring form of design, but I walk out with more knowledge and an appreciation for infographic designers! Starting with out exercises, I had the most fun in Exercise 2, creating an infographic organising characters from a game I have been  addicted to  playing a lot was really fun! Also using the different motifs and figuring out ways I can incorporate their unique elements into a cohesive design was really enjoyable. Project 1/2 was a little bit of a hurdle for me. I was struggling quite a lot initially in coming up with a design that captured the grandmas personality yet also was visually appealing and understandable. My ideation process took much longer in this, but I also finished this project with an end result I enjoyed creating. Lastly, for our final project. I had a great experience with my group members. Everybody was responsive and helpful. We all worked great as a team and I have no complaints whatsoever about my members, other than the fact I sadly didn't get to see them in real life. Being the leader of a group is always a little challenging, but I do enjoy being leader when the group members are all a pleasure to work with. I also really grateful for my friends being supportive of me during this semester as it wasn't an easy few weeks for me!

Observation: This module has made me much more observant on analytics and how they are designed. Along with infographics, such as the COVID-19 cases per day ones we can see posted daily. There is always hierarchy to the information and it is always made appropriate for the given situation. The COVID-19 infographics posted daily are all very plain and easy to understand, as we dont need to be decorating it because, well it is rather inappropriate. Compared to an infographic about a recipe or an interesting concept from space, those are beautiful illustrated to give the viewers visual elements to look at and also understand the information given simultaneously  

Findings: This module was extremely interesting to me, I've been exposed to the world of design for a few years now. Yet this topic has been swept under the rug for me, I hadn't even paid much attention to the intricacies of infographics and things of that nature. Take the UI of social media, chunking has been applied to all the information so we can understand things easier. Even phone numbers! Such small details you fail to think about until you realise a jumble of numbers is extremely difficult to remember until chunked into smaller groups. Theories such as Manuel Limas Manifesto and the LATCH principles all affected the outcome of our project as we all had much better understanding about information design by the end. It is a delicate form of design, one that is underappreciated in my opinion! It's a very difficult form of design to take upon as you need a high understanding of hierarchy, harmony, balance and many more principles. All of which are used to create an infographic that is easily understood yet also visually appealing.