Fifty words:
Wrexham Farmers Market
9th Of March 2009
I aim to graphically represent the differences in movement of four groups of people through a particular area of Wrexham Farmers market over a period of two minutes. The groups are men and women under sixty years of age and men and women over the age of sixty. I intend to represent this information in a visually interesting and unusual fashion but maintain clarity of communication.
This was an interesting project as most people appeared to have wrestled with it in some sense. The brief was broad and fairly unrestricted which is normally good for me but as it involved collecting data from the market, which is a massive source, without a specific purpose and audience, left me blindly trying to collect too much without focussing efforts on one area resulting on running out of time which is something I must be aware of in the future to better focus my efforts.
Representing the data/information visually had it problems too. The information could be shown abstractly and used to produce visually interesting work has some inherent value or the information could be produced with clarity and with specific purposeful intent. I asked myself does the image have to relate to the market its self, does the image need to communicate the information clearly if the data was collected just for the sake of collecting data and is therefore meaningless. These debate existed between tutors also which perhaps means that in terms of university, students are better served by following their instincts with how to frame their projects. I developed two approaches at the same time. One which was fairly straight down the inline in terms of how it communicated the information. It used a 70′s illustration stylised market scene and the values taken from the original data was shown through a bar chart which grew from animated(flash?) apples rolling out of a carton to form the blocks of the bar chart. I decided in the end that this was too conventional and backward an approach and didn’t really result in anything of any value.
The second idea was to use a seperate set of information which was to trace the physical movements of people in four different groups across a fixed space in the market. For this I wanted to use a visual approach that was more unusual but still kept the communication intact. Its content was the original tracings of the movements of those four groups of people set aside a mini 3D market set made from doctored photographs to relate the information to the place it was collected from. The main problem was differentiating the four sets of movement information but then establishing a connection between those and the specific four groups. in the end I chose to do it using colour coded type to match the colouring of the information lines. Typographically I’m not really satisfied with it and should have either considered it much earlier on to blend it in to the design or experimented more keep in line with the visual language of the rest of the work.
Reflection:
In my efforts to find something which looks different and unusual I’ve found it difficult to judge whether or not the image is good or bad given that it’s been a departure for me in a lot of ways. In terms of type, I need to find more examples and and go through a longer visual trial and error process to find some which fits and apply it in a visually interesting way. I am comfortable, I think in more hand created type and using it with more illustrative work, so this one has been unchartered territory for me. It has been rewarding in some ways however because it’s been a move forward in a direction I haven’t taken before visually and I’ve tried to stay away from re-gurgitating images or styles used by other people.
