JordanO_R06

This Chart by Alfred Barr is a great piece of information design. You can easily navigate through this chart and relate a piece of information whether it is an artist or an era to another. I find the typographical hierarchy in this graphic to be especially effective and easy to see the difference in importance between more important movements, or more influential artist. You see cubism on this chart and it is represented with the largest font size. This is a chart stating the importance of cubism and how it had an impact on modern art. From there you see a number of other very important artistic movements, but there font size has been greatly decreased to stress that these movements are less important than the cubism movement. In even smaller text the city of the world that these movements started in and the year that they started are listed. This is important information to the graph but as soon as we are able to find the movement itself we can thin out the information with smaller text, and create less noise decreasing the appearance of chart junk. Down farther in the article you see an example of how the chart looks without arrows. The chart looks barren without the arrows and greatly decreases the visual value of this chart. Another visually interesting aspect of this chart is the descending time line. It is mentioned in the article that this is supposed to represent a old movie strip and that the years running down the sides would give off the appearance of the holes used to guide the film through the camera. This text is all so represented in orange, which is maybe the only flaw that I see in this information graphic. I see that there are certain other areas of this chart that are represented in orange and I am not sure of the correlation between the years and the movements represented in orange. I can probably conclude that the orange was chosen to give the chart some more color, and to save money areas needing other emphasis were all characterized using the same color. These influences that seem to be brought in externally or have a different relations some how could use the benefit from a key or some kind of additional indicator or another color to represent their importance separately from the dates and chart title.

The other article that we had to read I found to be very interesting as well. I like all of the different examples how I can represent information in future information graphics. I can see myself using all of these different examples at some point in my future design work. Exploding views, ghosting, cutaways, and small multiples are all great ways t display design. For my final project I will be producing a diagram with information from all of the Brewers games I have been to at Miller Park. I plan to chart emotional responses, memories from the game and tidbits I know from around Miller Park. I will defiantly be incorporating these techniques in my final design.