Kate+D+R02

Since I was not in class for the first day, today was really my introduction to what this course is all about. I am pleasantly surprised that it’s so interesting! Previous class work has led me to an interest in mapping but I’ve never had the chance to fully explore it. I find mapping to be a beautiful art form and not just an informative tool.

The video we watched in class today was interesting too in how it showed graphs that when the content was missing we could make assumptions about what the graph was depicting. Most of the time all the guesses were wrong and the graph was something completely absurd, which correlated to our discussion of graph variables not having any direct meaning to one another and seeking out information to fill in the unknown. The concept that humans are so afraid of what they do not know that they attempt to find some direct correlation between possibly unrelated items is almost comical to me. People will believe anything when it is presented to them in a factual fashion.

Todays reading about separation and layering is important in the relief of noise and therefore in effective communication. The quote “undifferentiated, unlayered surface results, jumbled up, blurry, incoherent, chaotic with unintentional optical art. What we have here is failure to communicate” spoke very clearly about the whole point of having graphs, which is effective communication. Looking at the different examples of maps really showed how proper layering and background tones makes a difference in the ease of understanding a map or graph.

The section in the reading about weight and negative areas was also interesting because it is something we encounter everyday. The use of borders and illusory borders is strategic in effective design and marketing and can be detrimental when over-used. It seems like every advertisement or logo is scattered with outlining boxes and borders in an attempt to stylize the product and ends up over-stimulating. I’m not a graphic designer but as a photographer I am interested in how graphics play in to effective advertising. I now realize how things like text size, font, color and placement can be the difference between an effective graph and an unusable graph.