ASS. 2 | ON THE WAY TO THE FINAL VERSIONS

With the remarks from the test and the VCD-counseling meeting we experimented a bit. Some of these experimental images are shown below:

The icons are in a perfect circle, yet the tiles on the left seem to be bigger than the ones on the right due to the perspective lines. The gradient provides a contrast difference which makes it look like the tiles spiral into the depth starting at the bottom going clockwise.

As seen/ to be proven: a perfect circle. The tiles have a slight gradient (starting at the bottom, going clockwise) in both highlight/shading and in blur. It is barely noticeable, but gives a slight percetion of depth.

Instead of the perspective lines we chose a picture with perspective as background. Colorized it to yellow as it opposes the blue tiles. The more contrast it has the more likely it is to be seen first. So once again from high to low contrast (clockwise).

ASS. 2 | STILL SOME DIFFICULTIES...

After already quite a long process of improving and improving and improving, we still had some difficulties in finding and designing good maps. Meaning, maps that differ in a very subtle way, but make you without a doubt walk in two different directions. Related to this we still were not really sure whether some manipulations were allowed or not. This together with the fact that the test did not work out that well (not many respondents would walk in the way we wanted them to do) made that we wanted to make use of the VCD-counseling meetings that are offered this week. This was very useful and has put us on the right track again. The remarks we got, may be of use for you as well, so here they are:

• we should not fiddle with the circle too much
• we should influence the user with only the theory of the book of Colin Ware
• keep it simple
• if the different drawings of the buildings distract too much, make them more alike
• give buildings sort of the same spacing
• the train station cannot semi overlap the circle, this would be too obvious
• in the future let girls interview, they are more likely to be helped
• be as creative as possible!

ASS. 2 | IN THE MEANTIME...

Because a selfrunning movie will be the means to present our design process and final designs, we thought of the set up of the video in the meantime. In the images below you see a general set up in parts and a more detailed scenario of what should be discussed in every part.

• Part 1: in this part the emphasis will be on the first concepts, presented during the first presentations. Every visual variable we included in these concepts to influence the way of walking will be shown in a close up. 
• Part 2: in the second part the emphasis is on the improvements, we had to make resulting from the presentations.
• Part 3: this part emphasizes on the user test. The improved concepts, with which the user test has been conducted, will be shown. After that some pictures of the research itself in Rotterdam will be presented, followed by some results and comments of the respondents. And maybe at last, a summary of the improvements to be made, will be shown.
• Part 4: In this part the final designs will be shown and close ups of the improvements that have been made. To end, the concepts, used for the test, as well as the final designs will be shown together, to give better insight in the improvement we hopefully made. 

ASS. 2 | THE USER TEST

With the improvements made, resulting from the presentations, we came up with two concepts, with which the user test would be conducted. Curious to see what they look like and how the user test went, take a look at the seperate page THE USER TEST.

ASS 2. | IMPROVEMENTS OF THE FIRST CONCEPTS

With the remarks made during the presentation (mentioned in the previous post) we started thinking of improvements we could apply to make improve our first concepts. Because the style was received well we wanted to stick with that. Some improved concepts will be discussed next.

In this concept we tried to use the “perfect circle” that is an important requirement for this assignment. When you visit a new city it is easy to get lost, that is why we placed the names of some important streets in the concept. The representation of the canals (represented by blue strokes) is another important reference in trying to find a place in Delft. This is only a first idea for improvement. We are still thinking about how to make a subtle distinction between the two routes. The change in the size of  buildings is one option, use of color is another one.

Another concept we tried is the one below. This one has a sketched like background, trying to fit the style of the buildings. We thought a direction in the background may elicit you to walk in a certain direction, but next to the fact that it is not really a visual variable mentioned by Colin Ware, we do not think it is that helpful. The circle placed in perspective should give the viewer a more 3D perception of the map, which could elicit a better understanding of the path the viewer should follow.  

 

The next concept is a presentation of the map in a perfect circle, explored in different colours. This concept does also not elicit the viewer to walk in a certain direction. In addition, we are afraid people may walk in a zig-zag movement, because there is no distinction between the circle road and the roads inside the circle. We do think Delft Central Station, in the middle at the bottom of the visual, is clear as the starting point. The image of the station is bigger than the images of the other buildings and because of the 'height on picture plane' visual variable the station at the bottom of the image will be perceived as closer to the viewer and the cow at the top of the visual as farther away. So this might be something interesting to work with in the final design. Together with the circle in perspective this could be a good solution. 

 

ASS. 2 | THE ROUTE CONTINUES...

During the presentations of the first concepts many remarks were made, which should be taken into account while designing the improved versions of the concepts. Some remarks made on our and other concepts were:

• first of all: implementing the perfect circle (yes, we were one of the many groups who didn't understand this correctly)
• nice style: made them think of children's drawings and children's perception on drawing a (in reality) 3D area, which could be something interesting to take into account for improvement. This remark made us think of the map of amusement park de 'Efteling' in Kaatsheuvel in the Netherlands (shown below). The map is nice and also shows some visual variables (mentioned in 'Visual Thinking for Design'), like cast shadows, perspective and height on picture plane. The big difference with our map, however, is that this 'Efteling' map does not lead you in a certain direction, which ours does have to elicit. Because of that, the map turned out to be less usefull than we thought in advance.

• distinction between the two routes: visual variables like gradient, move certain elements, color code can be used
• the use of a sign like "you are here" at the beginning of the route is not allowed
• characteristics like the canals in Delft can be used to make the map more clear

With these remarks in the back of our head we thought of new concepts which will be shown and discussed in the next post.

ASS. 2 | FIRST CONCEPTS OF THE ROUTE

The second added page FIRST CONCEPTS ASS. 2 (see tabs above) presents the first concepts of both versions of the route, with an explanation of the different manipulations we did. If you want to, have a look!

ASS. 2 | GUIDING THE ATTENTION IN A CERTAIN DIRECTION

Before designing the visuals for the map, we thought of the different visual variables we wanted to integrate in the concepts, with which the behavior of the visitors should be influenced. We divided the concepts in three parts and thought of manipulations per part:

Map:

simplification

manipulation

Buildings:

size

perspective

shadow

brightness

orientation 

groupings/ overlapses

Route:

diverge/converge

color intensity

ASS. 2 | SOME FIRST IDEAS...

Without focussing on the interesting places yet, a first "global" idea about the design of the route was thought of and made visual. You see we started with a more 3D visual.

However, we thought that within this concept it would be hard to present the route in a clear way, because of its fully rounded (3D) shape. Therefore we came up with the idea to present it in half a sphere...

But this still seemed not the right way to visualize the route. To implement the learned theory about the different visual variables (from the book of Colin Ware) in the design of the map, we thought it would be better to map out the route on a (perceptual) flat surface. And from this point on we started thinking in different concepts. Beginning with a drawing of the assigned route, which would be the basis of the new concepts.

ASS. 2 | PLACING A LARGE BILLBOARD

The next step in this course is the start of the second assignment. In this assignment a large billboard will be placed near the central railway station of Delft which offers visitors information about a route through Delft passing different interesting places. The route can be followed in two directions, alongside the cultural route and the shopping route. For both directions a design for the billboard should be developed, with only subtle differences between both versions. However, one version should elicit the visitors to walk the cultural route, the other the shopping route, without the use of clear direction symbols like arrows. 
One of the first steps to start with was to identify the interesting places to visit alongside the assigned route; which places would you visit if you were a visitor in Delft? We tried to make a simple summary of the map; the following picture contains names of principal streets and the names of the places that would be a must to go to for a turist.

Take a look!

ASS. 1 | COMPLETED!

After a few weeks exploring, analyzing, manipulating and writing, the report with the final results is completed. Want to have a look how we did it? Open our report under the REPORT ASS. 1 tab above.

ASS. 1 | IMAGES + CHAPTERS + MANIPULATIONS

The chapters are divided and now the manipulating starts. To give you a brief impression of the kind of manipulations we made, an example of a manipulation for every image is posted here.

Grapus 1

POP OUT!

*Red Blur

The red figure overhangs from the background because its color and shape:

Color: The red color has a strong contrast with the blue-white environment.

Shape: The general shapes in the poster are built with straight lines while the red form has many edges that can be distinguished at first sight.

*Yellow triangle

This shape pops out but in a less important way because it is smaller than the red form.

Color: The yellow color has a huge contrast with the blue-white surrounding.

Orientation: the text in the poster is aligned vertically in a virtual straight line while this triangle seems to be rotated for the vertical axis.

Hema products 2

The upper label is clearly separated from the background. This is part­ly done through colour. The colours are different from the background so they don’t belong to the back­ground. But done through contour/ square shape, for even though multiple colours are used, you still feel they all belong to the label. The lower label emphasises this last remark, for here a part of the label is almost equal to the colour of the background. Yet still you recognize this part to belong to the label. The labels appear more likely to belong to the same group because they are both oriented in the same horizontal direction. 

Still life with three puppies

Bottom-up (information drives pattern building, features à patterns à objects): In the first stage, when looking at the image an enormous amount of features arrives at the eye. In the second stage brain pixel processors detect the different feature information and divide the visual field up into areas of common colour and texture, which results in continuous contours; patterns, e.g. many dark blue features next to each other in three separate groups. In the last stage the patterns are processed into a small number of visual objects. In the example the dark blue patterns are three wineglasses. When the dark blue features would be all different (A), a wineglass would not be visible. Dark blue features at the outside of the object, like a stroke (pattern) (B) is already more supporting in perceiving an object than when all features would be different.

The Piazza San Marco in Venice

Linear perspective as shown by the red lines. They merge into a vanishing point. The two vanishing points combined form a base for the horizon assuming they are parallel. The horizon indicates the viewpoint from the painter. Which tells us he must have been on the same height of the second floor windows on the right side of the painting.

ASS. 1 | IMAGES + CHAPTERS

Next step in the assignment is to decide which chapters could be applied well to which of the four images. In this part we experienced some chapters to be difficult to assign to images while others were very easy to assign and would be suitable for almost all images. Eventually we made suitable combinations in our opinion, which are shown next... 

Still life with three puppies

The piazza San Marco in Venice

Hema products 2

Grapus 1

ASS. 1 | WHAT ARE THE CHAPTERS ALL ABOUT?

The first assignment is about investigating the possibilities of manipulating visual variables. We had to do this by analyzing four images, that were assigned to us, and trying to apply the theory about visual variables mentioned in the book of Colin Ware, to these images. But before doing this, it was important to have a better understanding of these visual variables, so we started reading and exploring the different chapters in the book first. By doing this, we created some kind of memo's on which we summarized the chapters by means of keywords. We did this for every chapter, which resulted in the images shown below...

Reading about the "real world" experiment carried out by psychologists Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin at the start of the first chapter 'Visual Queries', made us think of another experiment (also from psychologist Daniel Simons) in which somewhat the same happens, but this time with a gorilla. Apparently the lecturers also thought of this, considering the short movie about this same experiment that was shown during the first lecture. For the one's who missed it, have a look and watch the video below!

A BIT OF A CHAOTIC START, BUT HERE WE ARE AGAIN!

Because of a bit of a chaotic start in setting up our blog, also fairly mentioned by Group O, we have given our blog a restart and will now first properly introduce ourselves. We are group V existing of:

Gabriela Ascencio

Joany Beer

Quérine van Casteren

Bob Kloos

With this group we are doing the course Visual Communication Design at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. The course is about visual design and visual perception of information. With the book 'Visual Thinking for Design' of author Colin Ware, together with the given assignments, we try to make the theory and knowledge around these topics ours. In the next post we will show you more about how we interpreted and summarized the chapters in the literature.  

And last, sorry group O! Thanks for the first comments, but because of the restart these are removed as well. We think, however, that with the restart we covered most of your comments. Till next week!