Prototyping in VCD102

Now the idea was set and I was ready to make it. I proceeded to remake the sketches that I had on paper in Illustrator, and it turned out good. At first when prototyping, I had no idea of what kind of data sets to put in, but by using some of them I figured out that a column graph and a pie graph were the best choices to visualise the data.

At first I had a very barebones design going in due to lack of data, so I decided to input all of the data first and then arrange it in a pleasing way. One of the first things that stuck through every design was the colour scheme. I did try other colour schemes in the process, but none were a match for blue/orange, because using the blue for the sky was too good to take away, and the orange was a fantastic representative for the ground.

The forward facing plane that I also initially put in didn’t move much either. I tried other designs for the plane, including a more dynamic 3/4ths perspective, which was cool. But then I had to move all of the data around and I found that it didn’t flow quite as nicely as I expected. I was still very set on my original design, and never really changed it due to the fact that I just did not like any alterations that I made. Sometimes you can only improve in prototyping, and sometimes results aren’t quite what you are expecting. But I am also hesitant to make alterations if I feel that the current design works well, so I might still have an issue of not pushing the designs far enough to work or click. My tutor offered to help, and her alterations made me realise that there was in fact, a lot more to possibly change in the design. I took some of the changes she made in her small prototype design change for me, such as hierarchy and making the title text bigger, as well as changing some fonts to be a bit more stronger.

At the end of the day, I had two prototypes to choose from, the 3/4ths angle, and the original forward facing one. I picked the forward facing one as I thought it was a good composition and appealed to me more. Even in all of the stages of prototyping, i never felt the need to made hugely dramatic changes. I still don’t know if that is my downfall or not, but I am proud of the design I made regardless. The one place that I struggled with when making this piece was the typography. I wasn’t sure if I should use bold font, italic font, or just leave it as it is. Should I make the font larger or smaller? I settled on two font styles, but I still can’t help wonder if they were the appropriate choices for the text that I laid out.

I am generally happy with my design, but also feel that something is missing in the prototyping stage, and hopefully I’ll find that missing thing and improve on it for my next project this semester.