2008 Helsinki

 

what was fine and what not, about my design process?

 

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Time reserved for the graphic design part, as in pulling the actual poster together from the individual finished elements was minimal. I was lucky Lucas gave us an extra 30 minutes: I created the entire poster in InDesign during that slack. Fonts are not carefully thought out, layout came out of the pipe, image was the first hit on google with the keyword 'chinese mountains' and I have no idea who controls the copyright. Sorry for stealing. If this ends up in the workshop exhibition, I will have to replace the picture with something else. But in the end, the final poster design was completely controlled by the actual content images from the NodeBox scripts, their sizes and respective order is all defined by the inputs and the algorithms. I could say, that in the end, my final brief designed the visuals for the poster, not me. And that's how it should be, in a way. Automation rocks?

 

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Second time in this ws, I would attend a third time, as well. I like the software, and how quick it is for prototyping. The original brief was buillding an interactive app, taking you through the Kanji visualization steps in the method step-by-step, and speaking out the keywords through the system synth. I almost got there, but building the Kanji database was out of the question during these weeks, even for the first 2 lessons like I originally planned. Next step for me is to clean up the code, pull some of that shit together and build a gizmo for building new graphs out of a Heisig index number.

 

The lesson graphs made with the Graph library in nodebox work fine as a wall sheet, I believe. They are good for taking notes, drawing doodles and keeping track of where you are in the review stages. The graph needs some subclustering, so the related kanji will stick together more closely. 

 

The lesson graph, I guess, will be the tool that will help me the most in learning the Kanji after this workshop. Motivation was high because stakes were high. Studying the Kanji is a learning task that really benefits from good study materials.

 

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Nothing more to say for now about this information graphics experiment. If you're interested in the method or the lesson graphs, drop me a line at 

first name.last name taik.fi.