Designing The News

Today I have a mid term review, of which the require­ments are:

• A very short state­ment about the work
• An image of 1024x768 AND 2048x1536 for pub­lic­ity for the show
• Your project work
• A pre­sen­ta­tion about the project includ­ing back­ground, con­tex­tual and the­o­ret­i­cal research, what I am mak­ing, how I am mak­ing it, why I am mak­ing it
• Sketch­books and/or work­ing notes and files
• 2x printed A2 storyboards

To make things eas­ier for me to remem­ber, and also help with the pre­sen­ta­tion, I’m gath­er­ing up every­thing required into one post.

A short state­ment about the work

DTN is a series of exper­i­ments which visu­ally explore the news in var­i­ous ways to encour­age new ways of see­ing a pre­dom­i­nantly text based medium.

Pub­lic­ity images

For the pub­lic­ity images for the show, I chose to use the boat image for a head­line about pol­lu­tion as I feel it best sums up what I am try­ing to show. It is a graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a head­line, which shows sub­tle details of the story in the composition.

Your project work

The Design­Lab show­cases all of the com­pleted work so far, con­tained in posts which describe how and why I did what I did for each piece of work.

Research and theory

Back­ground: When I started the project my ini­tial idea was to cre­ate a piece of art­work every 1–2 days based on what was in the news­pa­pers. When my project expanded, I tried to decide what I wanted to say with each image, with the style and the amount of detail.

Even­tu­ally I wanted to cre­ate some visu­al­i­sa­tions of the news. When I researched into visu­al­i­sa­tions, I dis­cov­ered alot of what I was plan­ning to do had already been done before, and didn’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel. As I still wanted to exper­i­ment with visu­al­i­sa­tions, I decided to look into sta­tic visu­al­i­sa­tions. Extract­ing infor­ma­tion out of a news­pa­per for a spe­cific period of time, one week, and cre­at­ing a series of sta­tic visu­al­i­sa­tions focus­ing on the weight of the story, the con­tent and theme, the author, the posi­tion it appears in the paper, the cat­e­gory, and more.

Research: For the illus­trated images I have been mainly look­ing at dif­fer­ent graphic styles and ways of reduc­ing infor­ma­tion into its most sim­ple form. To take a headline/story and rep­re­sent it as a sin­gle image with­out the mes­sage being lost is alot about tak­ing the strongest most impor­tant points of a story, and focus­ing on com­mu­ni­cat­ing them. With my exper­i­ments I have found that over com­pli­cat­ing the image with too many ele­ments often mis­leads the mes­sage, as the end user ends up focus­ing on some insignif­i­cant detail rather than the main message.

For the sta­tic visu­al­i­sa­tions, I’ve been look­ing alot at dynamic visu­al­i­sa­tions and how they work, what kind of visu­al­i­sa­tions they pro­duce. Edward Tufte’s book ‘Envi­sion­ing Infor­ma­tion’ has some inter­est­ing ways of map­ping com­plex data, and alot of nau­ti­cal maps hold some excel­lent ideas too. Cur­rently I’ve been work­ing on weight­ing cat­e­gories and items in news, and sim­pli­fy­ing the paper. From the sta­tis­tics col­lected so far, even with­out them being visu­alised, there are inter­est­ing trends to be noticed and fur­ther developed.

What I am mak­ing: A series of exper­i­ments which encour­age new ways of visu­al­is­ing a pre­dom­i­nantly text based medium. The visu­als look at reduc­ing and expand­ing news to give either a ‘quick mes­sage hit’, or fur­ther insight into a headline/story. Pre­sented as desk­top wall­pa­pers and posters, the images are intended to be used as accom­pa­ni­ment to news­pa­per arti­cles to encour­age a wider audi­ence to dialect about a sub­ject more than a stand­alone arti­cle might.

How I am mak­ing it: As the work I’m doing is very graph­i­cal, the pro­grams I’ve been using are mainly Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor, and InDe­sign. For some of the visu­al­i­sa­tions, I’ve been col­lect­ing sta­tis­tics by updat­ing a spread­sheet in OpenOf­fice, and then using some online tools such as ManyEyes by IBM to see how the data works in a stan­dard dynamic visual.

Why I am mak­ing it: Some­times a head­line isn’t enough to attract a reader to an arti­cle, and images are used to give a reader fur­ther insight and set the scene. I thought that if I could rep­re­sent the most impor­tant ele­ments of the arti­cle in a sin­gle image, whether the reader actu­ally read the arti­cle wouldn’t mat­ter, as they would know by look­ing at the image what the arti­cle was about.

Depend­ing on the com­plex­ity of the image, a quick look at the image may offer a user one or two impor­tant points. A longer look may offer a user an idea of how the images’ ele­ments are inter­act­ing with one another, giv­ing a visual pic­ture of how the head­line comes together. For some of the more detailed images, sub­tle arti­cle details are embed­ded only to be noticed by those who take an engaged approach to under­stand­ing the composition.

For the sta­tic visu­al­i­sa­tions, I thought it was inter­est­ing to cap­ture a moment in time, instead of hav­ing a dynamic visual which changes when­ever a new story is pub­lished. As I didn’t know what would hap­pen in the one week I recorded the data, it was quite inter­est­ing to think what could have hap­pened. For exam­ple, if this project was con­ducted in the week of Sep­tem­ber 3, 1939, it would have recorded the date when Eng­land and France declared war on Ger­many, or any other sig­nif­i­cant date in his­tory. How­ever, if a major event like this had hap­pened it wouldn’t have given a true account of what hap­pens in the news the rest of the time. Hav­ing a rather major event free news week means the spread of news top­ics would be on aver­age the same as any other day of the year, giv­ing a clearer pic­ture of what the news is in the UK dur­ing this time.

Sketch­books and/or work­ing notes and files

I have a hell of a lot of notes and idea sketch­ing which I’m not scan­ning in or post­ing. Mainly because if I did you wouldn’t be able to deci­pher my chicken scratch anyhow.

Printed A2 Storyboards

The sto­ry­boards can be pre­viewed in PDF for­mat by click­ing on the images below. They very briefly explain the project, and show­case some of the work com­pleted so far.

UPDATE: After the review

Well I had my review the other day. All seemed to go pretty well. On the whole it helped me to clar­ify a few things.

• What func­tion does the project serve? The project is about visu­ally edit­ing head­lines, sto­ries, and news­pa­pers to try to com­mu­ni­cate what the sub­ject is about more effec­tively. Images which appear with news sto­ries are usu­ally there to set the scene or give iden­tity to a char­ac­ter, but what I am try­ing to do is merge the text and the images into one com­po­si­tion which com­mu­ni­cates the facts, and removes the opin­ion and the unclear.
• What are the out­comes? Two main strands of work: Visu­ally edit­ing indi­vid­ual news head­lines, and cre­at­ing sta­tic visu­al­i­sa­tions of news­pa­pers as a whole. The head­lines will be pre­sented as desk­top wall­pa­pers and post­cards, and the sta­tic visu­al­i­sa­tions will be printed as large for­mat posters.
• Why sta­tic visu­als and not dynamic? There are many other exist­ing projects that cre­ate dynamic visu­als. For exam­ple, the ManyEyes visu­al­i­sa­tions I cre­ated show the data but not styled in the con­text of the sub­ject. A par­tic­u­larly bad week of news with lots of mur­der and vio­lence may be dynam­i­cally coloured in bright happy colours, not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the sto­ries. Plus I don’t want to auto­mate the process. There is a human edi­tor at the top of the news­pa­per hier­ar­chy who decides what goes in a paper and what doesn’t, so I want to become the visual edi­tor decid­ing what best com­m­mu­ni­cates the story in terms of image compositions.