Timeline Process

PROJECT BRIEF:

Establishing order: Graphic design often relies on typography to commuicate order, information, and sytems. The goal of this project is to make things easy to read, navigate and understand. As you learned in typography one, the foundation for creating an clear informational structure is a a strong typographic hiearchy. Type size, wieght, and color are the the first steps. Graphic elements (lines, arrows, grids) and page structure are often used to aid in establishing a clear hierarchy.

You will need to choose from one of the folllowing timeline choices...

TIMELINE CHOICES:

_ History of the Bathing Suit

_ History of Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions

_ History of Photography
_ Prehistoric Timeline
_ 100 years of Flight

CONTENT
_ timeline must have a range of dates
_ intro text
_ each point in time must have a date
_ and each point of time must have at least one sentance
_ images, icons, graphic elements are optional

Use the content from the website, you may use any additional resources for more information, images, etc. You may work in groups on collecting content.

CHALLENGE
How can you visualize the content? How can the audience get a quick understading about the topic? How are the pulled into the content to find out more?

TECHNICAL RESTRICTIONS
Format: poster or accordian folded book

Size: You determine the final size, poster min. size is 13 x 19 tall or wide
Color: Unlimited color palette
Typography: 2 typefaces, 3 type styles, and no more than 4 sizes of type.
Grid: proportional or ratio modular grid

OVERVIEW:

This timeline project was very quick but it didn't need more time. It was very cut and maybe a little dry. I feel like I learned a lot about how to organize information and make it clear to the viewer even if it wasn't the most interesting project, it was useful. I liked being able to pick our timeline and the brainstorming activity we did. As a group of "flight" we came up with a lot of ideas so none of us made a similar timeline. I feel that my timeline serves its purpose and is effective, I like the idea as well. It is obviously alludes to an airport and puts history in a modern context of flight.

FINAL: All type checked and perfected.

ROUND THREE:

this round was about exploring what to do with the icons. I made a set of black icons in the color boxes or the icons in the corresponding color. The other decisions to make was where to put the headline, where to put icons, and thickness of the "terminals".

ROUND TWO:

This round was an exploration of how to arrange the type at the bottom. The options were to organize it by color/category, columns, rows or chronological. Also, how to work out the category titles. I decided the columns organized by color worked best. It was visually clear and organized. I realized the text was almost overpowering the graphic so a clear hierarchy needed to be shown.

chronological by color in columns

by category chronologically in rows

chronological, corresponded to the color order of the terminals.

Round ONE:

After deciding the idea to work with these were the first executions.

I tried this because after doing the previous ones I thought the text needed to be more structured and uniform. I also came up with categories at this stage. I also made the terminals more of a look-a-like.
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I wanted to have more of an obvious division between the two sets of information within the semi-circles so, naturally a landing strip. It is a little overpowering, and obviously was not working.

This was my second attempt. After trying to align text into columns yet fit into the same sized space was an apparent failure due to different amounts of information, I tried one line. I tried to add more of a vertical pull and focus with the dotted line in the middle to allude to the runway.

As my first attempt my thoughts were: make the text exist in the terminal space to correspond with a gate-like set up. Use the dates as gates, arrange it chronologically, make the information fit, and make it clear that it is supposed to look like an airport map/layout. My color choice might sound silly but I still think it works. In light of the Olympics happening while this project began but more substantially...flight was developed by a collaboration of many people all over the world, many countries contributed. Also, flight connects people all over the world everywhere. The last reason was to capture what maps look like now in airports and the "airport graphics" they tend to use colors like these too.

My other sketched ideas were to do a view from the airplane window at night and taking a runway and using the horizon line.