teaching.mrstacey.org.uk

I’m happy to reveal my entry into Dan’s 2007 Review Design competition. It’s the result of a few days pondering, and more hours with photoshop than I would care to mention (or can really afford at the moment), but I’m happier with it that I was my last entry which I guess is progress.

I’ll come back and explain the process at a later date, but for I’ll just include image credits for the photos weren’t mine and see what the judges make of it!

The first idea was the clock, which came to me when I put this slide together for a staff inset, to show how the hour’s session would break down:

From here I got the idea of trying to work out approximately what I’d spent the 8760 hours in 2007 doing. An hour with a spreadsheet later I’d got an approximate breakdown, which I then converted into a 12 hour breakdown, inspired by those ‘if Earth’s history had been 24 hours’ analogies lots of science books use.

The original plan was to pull some of those areas out and analyse them further, but once I hit on the idea of the tag cloud I started looking for other ways to adapt the same data into new representations.

My biggest criticism of my ’4-slide’ entry from the summer was that there was nothing visual to tie the slides together, so I’d decided that this time I’d put all four images on the same slide, and work tying them together visually. I had the idea of trying to use a ‘defining moment’ image in the background (which was always going to be the birth of my son) and from there it was a short leap to including that image as the third design. While it might be stretching the brief a little, it really does sum up my 2007 and, for me, works in the context of the whole thing.

Which left me with one part of the display left. I’d been playing around with the spreadsheeet containing the data, and hit on the idea of doing countries of the world. I was originally going to do population, but that proved hard, so I got some data from wikipedia on the physical size of the worlds countries and continents and mapped that against my 2007 data set. Some of the matches are a little forced (I had to merge two categories at one point), but the matching is actually fairly accurate.

In terms of the design, I like the layout and I’m pleased with how well I was able to hack the two external images (the watch and the map) into what I wanted. The mainly gray pallet came about by accident, but I stuck with because it was easier to manage than a colour one, which I suspect I wouldn’t have done as good a job with. My target for the next one* is to get my head round using colour to improve, rather than detract from my design.

All that remains now is to see what the judges think!

Images used in my designs:

• Vaters Taschen Uhr, orologio da tasca (from Flickr) – Watch
  
• World Population (from Wikipedia) – Map
• Tempi precari (from Flickr) – original clock image adapted in inset slide

* There is going to be a next one? Right Dan?