Information Design Concept

I am really excited about my Information Design Project.

My idea is based on music and how it has changed over time. I am doing research on Woodstock, and how the spirit of that concert was all about peace and freedom and tracing the evolution of bands to events such as the '99 Woodstock which ended in chaos and even the development of heavy metal, more specifically death metal bands that are so extreme as to promote cannibalism and murder. I want to look at how our society changed and influenced this massive change from music that promoted the spirit of peace and love to now where rock music is about the exact opposite.

My design idea is to have amps and speakers representing the bands  connected by cords and mini-plugs to show how the different band began and in what years. Another level of information would be the social forces and I think representing them using stage lights shining down on the amps to show what influenced what band and kind of what was going on in that time period.

I have a lot of information to sort through but I think I can pull this together. It is definitely something I am really interested in because I do go to a lot of rock concerts and it is an entirely different feel than was promoted at the first Woodstock.

Funny but True

This made me laugh, but its true. We would be out of a job if we could do this.

Information Design

Seven Deadly Sins of Information Design

Gluttony, sloth, and lust are fine sins for most real-world interactions, but sinning on the Web requires special skills. To help you avoid an eternity in the fiery pits, here's a handy guide to the Seven Deadly Sins of Information Design.

Drue Miller

Drue Miller is an information and interaction designer in Palo Alto, California. She has a B.A. in writing and design from Carnegie Mellon University.read her profile »

Sin 1: Forgetting who your users are
The first step in design is figuring out who you're designing for. Unfortunately, some designers skip this and proceed to "How many bleeding edge goodies can I fit on every page?"

But the fact is, some users don't have (or want) the latest beta browser/plug-in. Some users are stuck with slow connections and small monitors. Some users don't think the scrolling rainbow-headline Java applet with embedded MIDI theme song is neat. (Some users do, but we'll deal with them another time.)

If you're creating a high-bandwidth site, make sure your audience is capable of experiencing it. Not sure if they can? Provide a low-bandwidth option or find a simpler way to get your visitors your information. The same thing goes for page size: Don't assume all users will have large monitors unless you know this is true.

Sin 2: Not creating a flowchart
Flowcharts are the blueprints of site development. They're absolutely essential - even if you're just building a small site. A good flowchart reflects every page on the site (including database queries and results, forms, and error/confirmation messages) and helps the rest of the design team understand the scope and structure of the project. Create one before you start pushing pixels and writing code.

Sin 3: Not organizing your content
Information can be organized in many ways, but not all of them are equally useful. Try arranging your content in different ways to find the best fit. Should it be listed alphabetically? Grouped into categories? Presented along a timeline? Sorted from best to worst or largest to smallest? Play with different structures to find the best one - or two or three. Offering several structures lets users choose their own most meaningful path through the information.

Sin 4: Not using consistent navigation
Imagine if the street signs in your neighborhood changed on every block - on this block they're white Helvetica letters on a blue rectangle, but over there they're green Times Roman on a white square, and down the street they're missing entirely. Sounds kind of silly, right? No city would ever use a system like that.

The same logic should apply to your site. Navigation helps users get around - it tells them where they are and where they can go. Once you've established a convention for visual style and placement, stick with it.

Sin 5: Using unclear link colors
Choose your colors wisely: Users must be able to quickly tell which links they have and haven't visited. Links should be the most different from the text (if the text is black, links should be lighter and brighter; if text is white, links should be darker and heavier). Visited links should also look different than the text but should not jump out at the user - stick to bright and bold colors for links and more muted tones for visited links. Test your colors by squinting at your page - unvisited links should be more prominent than visited links and unlinked text.

Changing link colors throughout your site is fine so long as the reason for their change is clear to users (for example, you use different colors to designate different sections of your site). Don't change link colors simply because you can - a color change should communicate something to the user, whether it's "You've entered a new section" or "You've already visited that link."

Sin 6: Using the TITLE tag incorrectly
Page titles are oh-so important navigational cues! For proof, look at your bookmarks. Can you identify all those pages? If not, somebody didn't create their titles properly.

There are three ways to misuse the TITLE tag:

• Ignore it entirely, in which case the filename ("home.html") will appear in the title bar
• Repeat the same title on every page in the site
• Use titles that don't reflect what's on the page

Page titles should be brief and descriptive: Aim for under 10 words, since longer titles will be cut off in the title bar, and make sure that they accurately and adequately describe the page contents and distinguish that page from the others on the site.

Sin 7: Not looking ahead
Sites created without growth plans become cluttered and unusable. You've seen these victims of poor planning - new elements are crammed onto pages without any concern for how the final product looks.

Your site will change over time - you'll want to add information, prune old pages, incorporate new technologies and tags, and perhaps give it a complete visual overhaul. The best way to handle such changes is to come up with a plan for growth now, while you're in the early stages of design. Identify new sections and features you'll want to add and figure out where they'll fit in the current site structure. Determine how often you're going to update the site and draw up a schedule for maintenance. Planning to accept ads in the future? Figure out now where they'll go on your pages.

Express Your Thoughts!

Finals for Typeface

Here are my final designs that got critiqued today for our typeface project.

New Promotion Peice

I made some changes suggested in our critique. I definitely think the serifed type is an improvement. I am going search through some more typefaces and see if I can find one that looks a little bit older.

Typeface Designs

Designs from todays critique that I worked on until I fell asleep at 3 am . . .

Futura Brochure

This is a brochure for Futura that I found when I was looking at ideas for the promotional piece. I think it gives a good idea on how to break up the sections in my brochure. I want to do a tri-fold brochure, but I think this is useful as far as the information to include.

New Typeface

Here is the new kind of base design for my typeface. I fixed the sizes and swirls. I also added my own hand drawn star. I am still going to do the distortion of the letters by crumpling them and scanning them back in. I changed my idea of using duct tape back to actually sewing the letterforms. It is kind of a spin off my original idea. I thought about how my letters referenced fairytales with the vine like swirls and stars. I named the typeface Fairytale Unraveling. It reminds me of stories like Sarah Orne Jewett's, The White Heron, which have fairytale like qualities but the main characters do not live happily ever after. For my promotion peice then, I wanted to either a book, or even brochure and use that kind of fairytale quality to sell my typeface.

Graphic Designers Oath

Haha, I was looking at Typeface promotion posters and found this. It made me laugh, out loud :)

Book Covers Mounted

Finished Clare Mock-ups

Typeface Designs

This is the rough of my Typeface. I use the wacom tablet to draw the letterforms and swirls on the first set. Then I thought it looked to edgy and vine like which really wasn't what I was going for. In the next set of letters, I used a brush to place in some green star shapes. I liked them because of the white centers and I thought they brightened the text. I took it another step farther and added small stars to kind of create a trail from the green shapes. Really all I wanted from the stars was just a decorative element to make the text look brighter and kind of prettier with out going girly.

When we talked about my typeface in the critique, suggestions were made to hand draw decorative elements like the star. I like that approach and think it will work a lot better then the green shape. I am also going to edit the stroke of the actual letters and make it less pointed and then fix the swirls.

Mood board for Typeface

This is my mood board for the design your own typeface project. The basic idea is to have a typeface that is all swirly, fun and pretty but then gets crumpled up and torn apart, then tapped back together at the bottom. Tied together with a smile is a Taylor Swift song that talks about smiling at everyone when you are falling apart inside and trying to hold it together before anyone finds out. This is what I want my typeface to represent. It will just be a novelty typeface for headlines and banners, not used for body copy text.

Taylor Swift - Tied Together with a smile Lyrics:

Seems the only one who doesn't see your beauty
Is the face in the mirror looking back at you
You walk around here thinking you're not pretty
But that's not true, cause I know you

Hold on baby you're losing it
The water's high you're jumping in to it
And letting go and no one knows
That you cry but you don't tell anyone
That you might not be the golden one
And you're tied together with a smile but you're coming undone


Guess its true that love is all you wanted
Cause you're giving it away like it's extra change
Hoping it will end up in his pocket
But he leaves you out like a penny in the rain
Oh cause it's not his price to pay
It's not his price to pay

Hold on baby you're losing it
The water's high you're jumping in to it
And letting go and no one knows
That you cry but you don't tell anyone
That you might not be the golden one
And you're tied together with a smile but you're coming undone

oh oh oh oh
Hold on baby you're losing it
The water's high you're jumping in to it
And letting go and no one knows
That you cry but you don't tell anyone
That you might not be the golden one
And you're tied together with a smile but you're coming undone


oh oh oh oh
You're tied together with a smile but you're coming undone

50 Typographic Posters

I was looking up ideas for my promotional poster and found this site. These are really amazing and there is a lot of good inspiration with how they use type.

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Breathtaking Typographic Posters

• By Vitaly Friedman
• February 25th, 2008
• Design, Fonts, Inspiration
• 98 Comments

You can’t design without type. However, yon can use only type (or mostly only type) to create breath-taking designs. In fact, many graphic designers and artists take exactly this route to communicate their ideas through their works. The results are sometimes crazy, sometimes artsy, sometimes beautiful, but often just different from things we’re used to. Thus designers explore new horizons and we explore new viewing perspectives which is what inspiration is all about.

You can’t design without type: this is an argument for it.

This post showcases over 50 breathtaking typographic posters designed by artists across the globe. We feature Oriental, Iranian, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Russian typographic posters as well as a number of further references. This isn’t a “best of”, there is no ranking and the collection isn’t supposed to be complete; it’s rather subjective and quite random. All screenshots are clickable; however, links not always lead directly to the corresponding image (e.g. it’s impossible in Flash-based sites) — sometimes you’ll need to search for it.

You may also want to take a look at the article Typography In Motion we’ve published few months ago.

So what can be achieved out of simple letters and symbols? Please be patient, some screenshots are huge.

By the way, what was the last time you visited our sister site Noupe? Subscribe to Noupe's feed for more inspirational and design-related articles.

Breathtaking Typographic Posters

Christina Koehn / University of Washington, USA

Alex Banks / United Kingdom

Emiliano Lionel Suárez / Argentina

Juanma Teixidó / Asunción, Paraguay

Emil Kozak / Spain

Pablo Alfieri / Buenos Aires, Argentina

HeyHo / France

Vincent Bousserez / Paris, France

Drew Kora / Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA

in the lab

Aron Jancso / Budapest, Hungary

Andre Bergamin / Brazil

Oh Ishi / Siam, Thailand

Alejandro Paul / Buenos Aires, Argentina

mrgraphicsguy / Germany

lee25 / United Kingdom

Shaun Morrison / Brighton, England

25ah / Stockholm, Sweden

Andy Cambiaso / Argentina

Puerto Baires / Buenos Aires, Argentina

Todd Roeth / USA

Piotr Fedorczyk / Florence, Italy

Noel Tanner / Minneapolis, USA

Kate Andrews / London, United Kingdom

Experimental Jetset / Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Lennart Wolfert / Netherlands

Farhad Fozuni / Iran

Yaronimus Maximus / Israel

Bunch / UK

Playful applications for the 55DSL 2007 Christmas instore incentive. Tape and posters were designed and sent to each store where the staff were then encouraged to get creative with what they taped up to win 555 GBP worth of prizes.

Alex Trochut / Spain

Arjo Wiggins Poster

Pixelgarten / Germany

Apirat Infahsaeng / New York

Poster announcing Brian Collins’ lecture Design Changes Everything.

MAISON DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE Création de la nouvelle identité visuelle.
Projet non retenu.

Purple Haze / Germany

Rote Sonne Club (2007). Poster design for a clubnight.

Think Experimental / France

Aaron Pou / USA

Maxime Delporte / France

Job Wouters / Netherlands

In collaboration with Roel Wouters. Printed by Knust.
Folded A3 flyers for Jungstar (formaly known as Zeitgeist) a bimonthly party held at the sugarfactory organised by the MRKMLN-group.

Zak Group

There’s always work in progress / you’re always a work in progress.

Sterk Water / Belgium

Poster made for a expo of a local art school promoting the free grahics and the sculpturing department.

C100 / Germany

A Club Poster from Berlin

Mark Andrew Webber / Falmouth, England

Hanna Czapka / Germany